Willa Cather
Willa Cather (who was baptized Wilella)
was the first of seven children born to Charles
F. and Mary Virginia Boak Cather. For the first
nine years of her life, she lived in a farmhouse
near Winchester, Virginia. In 1883 she and her family
moved to Nebraska, settling near Red Cloud. A member
of a family that traced its ancestors to Colonial
America and, before then, to Ireland, Cather brought
to Nebraska a strong sense of 
identification
with uprooted immigrants, those pioneers struggling
to make a life in the New World while maintaining
the traditions of the Old. If Cather was drawn to
the stoicism and simplicity of people whose lives
were grounded in a harsh, pioneer existence, she
also shared the yearning of young people like herself
for a world shaped by art and beauty. Cather read
widely and, after she entered the University of
Nebraska in 1891, began publishing her writing in
the undergraduate literary magazine. While still
at the university, she supported herself as a journalist
and drama critic for the Nebraska State Journal.
The year following her graduation, in 1896, she
moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to edit Home
Monthly Magazine.
The ten years Cather spent in Pittsburgh
were crucial for her development as a writer, but
this period is obscure because she destroyed as
many letters as she could and forbade the publication
of the surviving ones. In 1897 she resigned her
editorship and began teaching Latin and English
in a public high school. In 1899 she met Isabelle
McClung, the daughter of a conservative Pittsburgh
judge, who invited Cather to move into her house.
In a milieu conducive to her cultural interests,
Cather concentrated her energies on writing poetry
and short fiction. In 1903 she published a poetry
collection, April Twilights. This was followed
by her first collection of fiction, The Troll
Garden, in 1905. In 1906 Cather moved to New
York City to join the staff of McClure magazine.
In New York she met the woman who would become her
lifelong companion, Edith Lewis. After her first
novel, Alexander's Bridge, was serialized
by McClure in 1912, she resigned her position,
completely relinquishing journalism and launching
her distinguished literary career.
During the next decade, Cather published
the works that established her international reputation:
the novels O Pioneers! (1913), The Song
of the Lark (1915), and My Antonia (1918),
and a second collection of short fiction, Youth
and the Bright Medusa (1920). Cather's appeal
rested in large measure in her lyrical depictions
of life in the Midwestern plains and the Southwest,
a region of the country she first visited with Edith
Lewis. Cather was drawn to the stoic pioneers who
often populate her fiction as well as attracted
to the figure of the individual artist. She is deeply
preoccupied with the choices he or she must make
to pursue his or her vision.
The recipient of many awards during
her lifetime, Cather received the 1922 Pulitzer
Prize for her 1922 novel One of Ours and,
in 1930, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American
Academy of Arts and Letters for Death Comes to
the Archbishop (1927). She was also awarded
several honorary doctorates. During the 1930s, Cather
produced three more novels and an important collection
of short fiction, Obscure Destinies (1932).
By the mid 1930s, however, she was beginning to
express an increasing sense of disillusionment with
contemporary values. Cather's last novel published
during her lifetime, Sapphira and the Slave Girl
(1940), returned to the Shenandoah Valley of her
childhood, exploring mother-daughter conflict in
the pre-Civil War era. Willa Cather died at the
age of 73. -James A. Miller
Photograph courtesy of Brown Brothers
