Willa Cather

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Willa Cather photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1936

Wilella Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) is among the most eminent American authors. She is known for her depictions of US life in novels like O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Early life

Cather was born in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, but her family relocated to Nebraska in 1883 and she spent the rest of her childhood in Red Cloud, Nebraska. She insisted on attending college, so her family borrowed money so she could enroll at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. While there, she became a regular contributor to the Nebraska State Journal.

She then moved to Pittsburgh, where she taught high school and worked for Home Monthly and McClure's Magazine. The latter publication serialized her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, which was heavily influenced by Henry James.

Writing career

Cather moved to New York City in 1906 in order to join the editorial staff of McClure's and later became the managing editor (1908). As a muckraking journalist, she coauthored a powerful and highly critical biography of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. It was serialized in McClure's in 1907-8 and published as a book the next year. Christian Scientists were outraged and tried to buy every copy; it was reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press in 1993.

She met author Sarah Orne Jewett, who advised Cather to rely less on the influence of James and more on her native Nebraska. For her novels she returned to the prairie for inspiration, and these works became popular and critical successes. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours (1922).

She was celebrated by critics like H.L. Mencken for writing about ordinary people in plainspoken language. When he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Sinclair Lewis said Cather should have won it instead. However, later critics tended to favor more experimental authors and attacked Cather, a political conservative, for ignoring the actual plight of ordinary people.

In 1973, Willa Cather was honored by the United States Postal Service with her image on a postage stamp. Cather is a member of the Nebraska Hall of Fame. In 1986, she was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. She was a close companion to opera singer Olive Fremstad.

Personal life

Cather taught English in a Pittsburgh high school from 1901 to 1906. This coincided, in part, with what some claim to be her 12-year lesbian relationship with Isabelle McClung. The claim postulates that by concealing her relationships with the women she allegedly loved (including Louise Pound, Isabella McClung, and Edith Lewis, the latter of whom was in a domestic partnership with her that lasted 40 years), Cather also concealed the ways in which these women possibly contributed to and nourished her creative writing abilities. [link]

Cather died in 1947 in New York, in the apartment she shared with Edith Lewis, and is buried in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. At the time of her death, she ordered her personal letters burned.

Trivia

• She wrote her first novel at age 38.

• For thirty years, she lived at No. 5 Bank Street, in Greenwich Village.

• After reading her cousin G.P. Cather's wartime letters home to his mother, wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning "One of Ours". He was Nebraska's first casualty in WW I.

• Considered her novels to be "High Art" and refused to change her style or themes to make her work commercially appealing, and did nothing to keep up with the current trends in fiction.

Personal quote

• "Youth is the source of power and creativity."

Nonfiction

• Willa Cather and Georgine Milmine The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1909) (reprinted U of Nebraska Press, 1993)

Novels

• Alexander's Bridge (1912)
• O Pioneers! (1913)
• The Song of the Lark (1915)
• My Ántonia (1918)
• One of Ours (1922)
• A Lost Lady (1923)
• The Professor's House (1925)
• My Mortal Enemy (1926)
• Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
• Shadows on the Rock (1931)
• Lucy Gayheart (1935)
• Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940)

External links

• [Willa Cather Archive] at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• [Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation] in Red Cloud, Nebraska
• [Willa Cather Page] at Gustavus Adolphus College
• [American Masters - Willa Cather]

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