Regional writing is often thought of as nationalistic and provincial; its authors, too, are often thought of in the same terms. Willa Cather’s novel, The Professor’s House (1925), turns this assumption on its head by presenting the West as a cosmopolitan, anti-nationalist space. In drawing on a number of non-fictional writings Cather produced in the early 1920’s, this essay tracks Cather’s formulation of a literary aesthetic that is simultaneously regionalist and cosmopolitan. This aesthetic marks the West, in particular, as a “foreign” and explicitly non-provincial space. As such, it is a key site for Cather’s vaunted “demueblé” style. The Professor’s House, one of Cather’s most formally innovative novels, presents the “demueblé” style by showing both what it is, as well as what it is not. As a notoriously “divided” book—split into three sections with a “violence” that many critics have attempted to explain—the novel’s differing parts reflect crucial shifts in style as well as content. The settings of the sections are linked to the style of the writing, aligning Godfrey St. Peter and his American Everytown of Hamilton with the “overfurnished,” cluttered style of the society novel, while Tom Outland’s Western narration is simple, straightforward, what Cather referred to the “fresh air” in an otherwise stuffy text. This “fresh air,” I argue, is distinctly anti-nationalist—even “foreign”—in essence. This reading of Cather’s novel prompts us to reconsider the regionalist text as an alternative to both the provincialism and nationalism that define American literature and American culture at large in the post- World War I United States. Like her novel’s “hero,” Tom Outland, Cather has often been thought of as a “quintessentially American” writer, but closer inspection shows that neither deserves this epithet.