Willa Cather

Willa Sibert Cather (; born Wilella Sibert Cather; December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including ''O Pioneers!'', '' The Song of the Lark'', and ''My Ántonia''. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for ''One of Ours'', a novel set during World War I.

Willa Cather and her family moved from Virginia to Webster County, Nebraska, when she was nine years old. The family later settled in the town of Red Cloud. Shortly after graduating from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Cather moved to Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33, she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She spent the last 39 years of her life with her domestic partner, Edith Lewis, before being diagnosed with breast cancer and dying of a cerebral hemorrhage. She is buried beside Lewis in a Jaffrey, New Hampshire plot.

Cather achieved recognition as a novelist of the frontier and pioneer experience. She wrote of the spirit of those settlers moving into the western states, many of them European immigrants in the nineteenth century. Common themes in her work include nostalgia and exile. A sense of place is an important element in Cather's fiction: physical landscapes and domestic spaces are for Cather dynamic presences against which her characters struggle and find community.

Early life and education

Cather was born in 1873 on her maternal grandmother's farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia. Her father was Charles Fectigue Cather. The Cather family originated in Wales, the name deriving from Cadair Idris, a Gwynedd mountain. Her mother was Mary Virginia Boak, a former school teacher. By the time Cather turned twelve months old, the family had moved to Willow Shade, a Greek Revival-style home on 130 acres given to them by her paternal grandparents.

Mary Cather had six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass, Jessica, James, John, and Elsie. Cather was closer to her brothers than to her sisters whom, according to biographer Hermione Lee, she "seems not to have liked very much."

At the urging of Charles Cather's parents, the family moved to Nebraska in 1883 when Willa was nine years old. The farmland appealed to Charles' father, and the family wished to escape the tuberculosis outbreaks that were rampant in Virginia. Willa's father tried his hand at farming for eighteen months, then moved the family into the town of Red Cloud, where he opened a real estate and insurance business, and the children attended school for the first time. Some of Cather's earliest work was first published in the ''Red Cloud Chief,'' the city's local paper, and Cather read widely, having made friends with a Jewish couple, the Wieners, who offered her free access to their extensive library in Red Cloud. At the same time, she made house calls with the local physician and decided to become a surgeon. For a short while, she signed her name as William, but this was quickly abandoned for Willa instead.

In 1890, at the age of sixteen, Cather graduated from Red Cloud High School. She moved to Lincoln, Nebraska to enroll at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In her first year, her essay on Thomas Carlyle was published in the ''Nebraska State Journal'' without her knowledge. After this, she published columns for $1 apiece, saying that seeing her words printed on the page had "a kind of hypnotic effect", pushing her to continue writing. After this experience, she became a regular contributor to the ''Journal''. In addition to her work with the local paper, Cather served as the main editor of '' The Hesperian'', the university's student newspaper, and became a writer for the ''Lincoln Courier''. While at the university, she learned mathematics from and was befriended by John J. Pershing, who later became General of the Armies and, like Cather, earned a Pulitzer Prize for his writing. She changed her plans from studying science to become a physician, instead graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1895.

Cather's time in Nebraska, still considered a frontier state, was a formative experience for her: She was moved by the dramatic environment and weather, the vastness of the prairie, and the various cultures of the immigrant and Native American families in the area.

Life and career

In 1896, Cather was hired to write for a women's magazine, ''Home Monthly'', and moved to Pittsburgh. There, she wrote journalistic pieces, short stories, and poetry. A year later, after the magazine was sold, she became a telegraph editor and critic for the '' Pittsburgh Leader'' and frequently contributed poetry and short fiction to ''The Library'', another local publication. In Pittsburgh, she taught Latin, algebra, and English composition at Central High School for one year; she then taught English and Latin at Allegheny High School, where she came to head the English department.

Shortly after moving to Pittsburgh, Cather wrote short stories, including publishing " Tommy, the Unsentimental" in the ''Home Monthly'', about a Nebraskan girl with a masculine name who looks like a boy and saves her father's bank business. Janis P. Stout calls this story one of several Cather works that "demonstrate the speciousness of rigid gender roles and give favorable treatment to characters who undermine conventions." Her first book, a collection of poetry called ''April Twilights'', was published in 1903. Shortly after this, in 1905, Cather's first collection of short stories, '' The Troll Garden'', was published. It contained some of her most famous stories, including "A Wagner Matinee", "The Sculptor's Funeral", and "Paul's Case".

After Cather was offered an editorial position at ''McClure's Magazine'' in 1906, she moved to New York City. During her first year at ''McClure's'', the newspaper published a critical series of articles of the religious leader Mary Baker Eddy, crediting freelance journalist Georgine Milmine as the author. Cather contributed to the series, but there has been some debate as to how much. Milmine had performed copious amounts of research, but she did not have the resources to produce a manuscript independently, and ''McClure's'' employed Cather and a few other editors including Burton J. Hendrick to assist her. This biography was serialized in ''McClure's'' over the next eighteen months and then published in book form. ''McClure's'' also serialized Cather's first novel, '' Alexander's Bridge'' (1912). While most reviews were favorable, such as ''The Atlantic'' calling the writing "deft and skillful", Cather herself soon saw the novel as weak and shallow.

Cather followed ''Alexander's Bridge'' with her three novels set in the Great Plains, which eventually became both popular and critical successes: ''O Pioneers!'' (1913), '' The Song of the Lark'' (1915), and ''My Ántonia'' (1918), which are—taken together—sometimes referred to as her "Prairie Trilogy". It is this succession of plains-based novels for which Cather was celebrated for her use of plainspoken language about ordinary people. Sinclair Lewis, for example, praised her work for making Nebraska available to the wider world for the first time. After writing ''The Great Gatsby'', F. Scott Fitzgerald lamented that it was a failure in comparison to ''My Ántonia''.

1920s

As late as 1920, Cather became dissatisfied with the performance of her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, which devoted an advertising budget of only $300 to ''My Ántonia'', and refused to pay for all the illustrations she commissioned for the book from Władysław T. Benda. What's more, the physical quality of the books was poor. That year, she turned to the young publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf, which had a reputation for supporting its authors through advertising campaigns. She also liked the look of its books and had been impressed with its edition of ''Green Mansions'' by William Henry Hudson. She so enjoyed their style that all her Knopf books of the 1920s—save for one printing of her short story collection ''Youth and the Bright Medusa''—matched in design on their second and subsequent printings.

By this time, Cather was firmly established as a major American writer, receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her World War I-based novel, ''One of Ours''. She followed this up with the popular ''Death Comes for the Archbishop'' in 1927, selling 86,500 copies in just two years, and which has been included on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the twentieth century. Two of her three other novels of the decade—''A Lost Lady'' and '' The Professor's House''—elevated her literary status dramatically. She was invited to give several hundred lectures to the public, earned significant royalties, and sold the movie rights to ''A Lost Lady''. Her other novel of the decade, the 1926 ''My Mortal Enemy'', received no widespread acclaim—and in fact, neither she nor her partner, Edith Lewis, made significant mention of it later in their lives.

Despite her success, she was the subject of much criticism, particularly surrounding ''One of Ours''. Her close friend, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant

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