Willa Cather
Willa Sibert Cather (/ˈkæðər/;[1] born Wilella Sibert Cather;[2] December 7, 1873[A] – 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
Wilella Sibert Cather
December 7, 1873
Gore, Virginia, U.S.
April 24, 1947 (aged 73)
New York City, U.S.
Jaffrey, New Hampshire, U.S.
Novelist
1905–1947
Edith Lewis (c. 1908–1947)
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. Lewis is buried beside her 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.
Novels
Short fiction
Poetry
Nonfiction and Prose Collections
Writing influences[edit]
Cather admired Henry James's use of language and characterization.[176] While Cather enjoyed the novels of several women—including George Eliot,[177] the Brontës, and Jane Austen—she regarded most women writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental.[29]: 110 One contemporary exception was Sarah Orne Jewett, who became Cather's friend and mentor.[H] Jewett advised Cather of several things: to use female narrators in her fiction (even though Cather preferred using male perspectives),[182][183] to write about her "own country" (O Pioneers! was dedicated to Jewett),[184][185][186] and to write fiction that explicitly represented romantic attraction between women.[187][188][189][I] Cather was also influenced by the work of Katherine Mansfield,[100] praising in an essay Mansfield's ability "to throw a luminous streak out onto the shadowy realm of personal relationships."[191]
Cather's high regard for the immigrant families forging lives and enduring hardships on the Nebraska plains shaped much of her fiction. The Burlington Depot in Red Cloud brought in many strange and wonderful people to her small town. As a child, she visited immigrant families in her area and returned home in "the most unreasonable state of excitement," feeling that she "had got inside another person's skin."[22]: 169–170 After a trip to Red Cloud in 1916, Cather decided to write a novel based on the events in the life of her childhood friend Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a Bohemian girl who became the model for the title character in My Ántonia.[73][192][193] Cather was likewise fascinated by the French-Canadian pioneers from Quebec who had settled in the Red Cloud area while she was a girl.[194][195]
During a brief stopover in Quebec with Edith Lewis in 1927, Cather was inspired to write a novel set in that French-Canadian city. Lewis recalled: "From the first moment that she looked down from the windows of the [Chateau] Frontenac [Hotel] on the pointed roofs and Norman outlines of the town of Quebec, Willa Cather was not merely stirred and charmed—she was overwhelmed by the flood of memories, recognition, surmise it called up; by the sense of its extraordinary French character, isolated and kept intact through hundreds of years, as if by a miracle, on this great un-French continent."[29]: 414–15 Cather finished her novel Shadows on the Rock, a historical novel set in 17th-century Quebec, in 1931;[196] it was later included in Life magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944.[197] The French influence is found in many other Cather works, including Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and her final, unfinished novel set in Avignon, Hard Punishments.[194]