“Paul’s Case” is set roughly at the turn of the 20th century. Willa Cather originally published the short story in McClure’s Magazine in 1905, and later in a collection of her other short stories. The story begins in Pittsburgh, where Paul attends school and works as an usher at Carnegie Hall, not to be confused with the Carnegie Hall in New York City—which, incidentally, is the city that Paul ends up fleeing to after stealing money and abandoning his father. The story thus largely takes place in turn-of-the-century New York City, where Paul admires the opulence of Manhattan life.
The story's publication coincided with the early Modernist period in literary history—a time of great formal and thematic upset within established artistic convention. During this period, many authors and artists were grappling with the unique existential struggles that accompanied widespread technological, scientific, and industrial advancements, along with globalization. Paul’s “case” represents one such existential struggle, within both its main character and its author.
Paul is dissatisfied with his environment but remains frozen, petrified with the enormous effort it would take to alter his circumstances in some permanent, long-lasting way. The daunting nature of these societal, environmental, and psychological factors that keep people chained to a hollow and unsatisfying life is a theme that recurs constantly in modernist writing. Renowned modernist poet T. S. Eliot writes in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" that "[w]e have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown." In these lines, the poem's protagonist imagines his dreaming and second-guessing as akin to a man lured in by sirens. Prufrock, like Paul, is content to live in his dream world, but he awakens from its lulling beauty to find himself drowning in reality. This, among others, is an important modernist predicament that Cather draws upon in the character of Paul.
