David Daiches's Willa Cather: A Critical Introduction (1951), published four years after the author's death, was the first work of criticism to consider Cather's entire career. Even though by 1969 Bernice Slote argued in her survey of Cather criticism that there was “nothing startling to modern critics” in the volume (“Willa Cather” 46), Daiches provides a fascinating illustration of the major trends—and challenges— that came to define Cather criticism during the 1950s through the 1970s. Primarily, critics during these decades were interested in two approaches: biographical criticism and archetypal/thematic criticism. The biographers wanted to know: What were the important events, people, and ideas in Cather's life, and how did they shape her work? The archetypal critics focused more on Cather's literary output, searching for the unifying principles and ideas that would run throughout her literary career. Those familiar with W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” may find it anathema to situate biographical approaches to authors and their texts alongside the school of close reading and archetypal criticism; but in the body of Cather criticism, the opposition between these two approaches breaks down, as many from the archetypal approach studied the way Cather incorporated memories or biographical details into her fiction and, likewise, many early biographers traced overarching patterns in Cather's literary works.

Daiches's study illustrated, first, the need for biographical criticism. His opening chapter, “Apprenticeship,” surveyed Cather's life from her birth in the 1870s to the publication of her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, in 1912: this period of thirty years was covered in a scant nine pages. While many readers may appreciate Daiches's brevity here, the stretch from the 1870s through 1912 covers half of Cather's life, which highlighted the scarcity of complete biographical information available to critics in the early 1950s. One stark reminder of this scarcity was Daiches's inclusion of an incorrect year of birth for Cather.