Cather is regarded as one of the most important American authors of the early twentieth century. While she is best known for such novels as O Pioneers! (1913) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Cather began her career as a writer of short stories, and many critics consider her a master of the form. Like her longer works, Cather's short stories often focus on sensitive, alienated individuals and examine their varying degrees of success in resolving conflict.

THE TROLL GARDEN, Cather's first book of fiction and the capstone of her early career. As different and individually distinguished as the seven stories may be, they share as their subject the role and status of the artist in American society. The passions, ambitions, and pretensions, the cant and the pathos of the art world, artists, pseudo-artists, aficionados, and dilettantes—all are amply represented here in the midst of their foibles, grand affairs, and failures, drawn with great style and subtlety by a writer gathering her formidable powers.

Cather was born in Virginia in 1873 and spent the first decade of her life on her family's farm in Back Creek Valley. Cather found her “quiet centre of life” in childhood memories of the Nebraska prairie, using them and other incidents from her life to create a series of remarkably successful novels between her retirement from McClure's and her death in 1947.