"The Sculptor's Funeral" is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in McClure's in 1905[1]
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In a small-town in Kansas, the body of Harvey Merrick, a famed sculptor, is brought back to his parents' house. Only Jim Laird, Harvey's old friend, and Henry Steavens, his student have any real emotion. While the mother cries out in overdone and insincere grief, Steavens and Laird remark on Harvey's harsh upbringing, and they wonder how he ever made it out of the town. Later, the mother yells at her maid for forgetting to do the salad dressing, displaying the mother's absolute cruelty and the falsity of her grieving. Before the funeral, the townspeople make fun of Harvey for his education and eastern lifestyle. Laird then lashes out at them, exposing the corruption of their ideals, along with practices of usury, gambling, shootings and so forth. Only Harvey escaped the corruption, and he was hated for it. The next day, Laird is too drunk to attend the funeral and Steavens returns East.
It has been argued that the short story was foreshadowed by Willa Cather's poem "The Night Express." The story's protagonist's prototype was the Pittsburgh-born artist Charles Stanley Reinhart. Cather wrote a feature story about the first anniversary of the death of Reinhart in 1897 and the erection of his monument Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh[2].