Willa Cather

• Born: 7 December 1873
• Birthplace: Black Creek Valley, Virginia
• Died: 24 April 1947 (cerebral hemorrhage)
• Best Known As: Author of O Pioneers! and My Ántonia

Willa Sibert Cather was a writer celebrated for her novels of the immigrant experience on the American frontier, including O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918). Cather was born in Virginia, but in her tenth year she moved with her family to a farm in Red Coud, Nebraska. While a student at the University of Nebraska (1891-95), she published her first short story and contributed to the Nebraska State Journal. After earning her degree, Cather worked in Pittsburgh as an editor and writer for The Home Monthly and the Daily Leader, and published a book of verse, April Twilight (1903). She then moved to New York, where she edited McClure's Magazine (1906-1912) and wrote short stories, publishing a collection in 1905 (The Troll Garden). Her experiences in Nebraska informed much of her work, and during her long career she was a prolific and well-regarded writer, known for strong female characters and acute observations of life. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her novel One of Ours, and received several honorary degrees and awards during her life. Her novels include The Song of the Lark (1915), Lost Lady (1923), Shadows on the Rocks (1931) and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940).

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The American author Willa Sibert Cather (1873-1947) is distinguished for her strong and sensitive evocations of prairie life in the twilight years of the midwestern frontier. Her poetic sensibility was in sharp contrast to the naturalistic and Freudian-influenced literary movements of her time.

Willa Cather was born in Winchester, Va., but at the age of 9 moved to Nebraska, where her father had bought a farm. Her immediate response to the stark grandeur of the prairie and her involvement in the life of the Bohemian and Scandinavian immigrants provided her with both the material and an unadorned manner of expression for her novels. Although she was educated largely by her mother, her knowledge of English literature and Latin was sufficient for her to do excellent work at the University of Nebraska. Leaving the prairie for the first time in 1900, she moved to Pittsburgh and found employment as editor, drama critic, and high school teacher.

In 1903 Cather published a collection of poems, April Twilights, and in 1905 a collection of short stories, The Troll Garden, neither of which indicated her considerable talent. Her first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912), the story of an engineer's love for two women, lacked emotional involvement.

In her poignant story of the prairie, O Pioneers! (1913), Cather at last discovered her subject matter. This tale of Alexandra Bergson, daughter of Swedish settlers, whose devotion to the land and to her tragically fated younger brother precludes her own chance for happiness, is a major novel and an important source for Cather's subsequent work. In Song of the Lark (1915) she presents the story of a young woman's attempt at artistic accomplishment in the constricting environment of small-town life. My Antonia (1918), generally considered her finest novel, is based on a successful city lawyer's reflections on his prairie boyhood and his love for Antonia Shimerda, a warm, vibrant Bohemian girl.

Cather's next novel, One of Ours (1922), about a man who goes to war in order to escape his midwestern farm environment, won the Pulitzer Prize. A Lost Lady (1923) depicts the conflict of a cultivated and sensitive young woman with the crass materialism of the post-pioneer period, and The Professor's House (1925) is a study of the problems of youth and middle age. These three novels differ from Cather's earlier studies of prairie life in that the midwestern atmosphere is used as a force in opposition to the artistic aspiration and intellectual development of the gifted inhabitants.

With the passing of the frontier and its ugly transformation into "Gopher Prairie," Cather permanently left the Midwest, both literally and as a thematic vehicle for her novels. She lived intermittently in New York and Europe until the late 1920s. Then she discovered the Southwest desert, which came to serve as an emotional substitute for the prairie. Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), which describes the dedicated missionaries in Mexico during the 1850s, and Shadows on the Rock (1931), a vivid re-creation of French-Catholic life in 17th-century Quebec, represent Cather's interest in Roman Catholicism and her attempt to find a historical metaphor for the qualities of heroism and endurance that she had observed in actuality.

Willa Cather's devotion to the land and her respect for those rooted to it imbue her work with a mystical quality. Man and nature are viewed as dual protagonists in a somber cosmic drama. Despite her love for the prairie, she did not permit sentimentally and nostalgia to cloud the clarity of her vision. She presented the intellectual stagnation, moral callousness, and small-minded bigotry that existed side by side with the heroism of frontier life. "Miss Cather's novels portray the results of the pioneer's defeat, both in the thwarted pettiness to which he is condemned by material failure," observed Lionel Trilling, "and in the callous insensitivity of his material success."

In her last years Cather devoted herself to literary criticism. Not under Forty (1936) contains an eloquent expression of her philosophy of writing.

Further Reading

The authorized biography of Willa Cather is Edward K. Brown and Leon Edel, Willa Cather: A Critical Biography (1953). The best book-length critical study is David Daiches, Willa Cather: A Critical Introduction (1951). More recent studies are John H. Randall, The Landscape and the Looking Glass: Willa Cather's Search for Value (1960), and Edward A. and Lillian D. Bloom, Willa Cather's Gift of Sympathy (1962). James Schroeter edited an excellent collection of essays, Willa Cather and Her Critics (1967). For briefer analyses of her work see the relevant sections in Rebecca West, The Strange Necessity (1928); Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (1942); Edward Wagenknecht, Cavalcade of the American Novel (1952); and Maxwell Geismar, The Last of the Provincials (1947).

(1873-1947), writer. Although known best as a novelist of the American prairie, Cather also published at least sixty short stories, numerous essays and articles, and two different editions of a volume of poems. Having achieved notable popularity at the peak of her career in the 1920s, she was viewed by many in the 1930s as an old-fashioned writer who ignored the pressing social issues of her time and relapsed into a more congenial past.

A revival of interest in Cather and her work began with the publication of several biographies in the early 1950s and accelerated as the women's movement gained momentum in the late 1960s and 1970s. New readers, attuned to issues of women's abilities and contributions, became aware that Cather's life was an exceptional one for a woman of her time. Moreover, they realized that her art, though espousing traditional values, was boldly innovative in conception and design. And it was central to the American experience.

As a participant in the great westward movement, Cather was uniquely qualified to write of pioneer life in the Midwest. Born in the hilly farm country near Winchester, Virginia, she moved with her parents to begin a new life in the sparsely settled frontier of Webster County, Nebraska. Accustomed to the more genteel lifestyle of Virginia, the Cather family soon moved into nearby Red Cloud, but not before young Willa had become acquainted with many pioneer families, most of them European immigrants.

Cather always believed that it was with her second novel, O Pioneers! that she hit, as she said, the "home pasture" and launched her career as a novelist. It was then she was certain that she had made the right decision in leaving an important editorial position with the muckraking McClure's magazine to strike out on her own. Encouraged by Sarah Orne Jewett, she devoted full time to her art and turned to a subject she knew firsthand--pioneer life in late-nineteenth-century Nebraska. Her fourth novel, My Ántonia, is a memorable eulogy of a pioneer woman whom Cather had known as a child and whom she revered all her life. One of the first to dare to use such unlikely material in fiction, Cather captured the imagination of a wide range of readers who were struck by the truth of her portraiture and the lyricism of her prose. Her appeal was not to the thrill seekers or the professional litterateurs.

Endowed with a special sense of the past and its value in the present, Cather wrote several novels that may be regarded as "historical." Most notable are Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock, the former an account of the firm establishment of the Catholic ministry in New Mexico Territory and the latter an account of early colonial life in Catholic Quebec. In both Cather depicts admiringly the civilizing influence of Old World culture, particularly French culture, on the rugged frontier of the New World.

Although some recent historians have faulted Cather for what they regard as inaccurate portrayals of certain historical figures, her defenders have pointed out that a writer of fiction may interpret and alter historical fact to suit the needs of her art. When such debates have long been forgotten, Cather's fiction will remain as a landmark in artistic accomplishment and a revelatory tribute to the people whose lives shaped some vital aspects of America's past.

Bibliography:

Mildred R. Bennett, The World of Willa Cather (1961); James Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary Life (1987).

Author:

Marilyn Arnold

See also Literature.

Cather, Willa Sibert (sī'bərt kăTH'ər), 1873-1947, American novelist and short-story writer, b. Winchester, Va., considered one of the great American writers of the 20th cent. When she was nine her family moved to the Nebraska prairie frontier. She graduated from the Univ. of Nebraska in 1895 and worked as a journalist and as a teacher in Pittsburgh. In 1904 she went to New York City. The publication of The Troll Garden (1905), her first collection of short stories, led to her appointment to the editorial staff of McClure's Magazine. She eventually became managing editor and saved the magazine from financial disaster. After the publication of Alexander's Bridge in 1912, she left McClure's and devoted herself to creative writing. For many years she lived quietly in New York City's Greenwich Village. The first of her novels to deal with her major theme is O Pioneers! (1913), a celebration of the strength and courage of the frontier settlers. Other novels with this theme are My Ántonia (1918), One of Ours (1922; Pulitzer Prize), and A Lost Lady (1923). The Song of the Lark (1915) focuses on another of Cather's major preoccupations-the need of artists to free themselves from inhibiting influences, particularly that of a rural or small-town background; the tales collected in Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920) and the novel Lucy Gayheart (1935) also treat this theme. With success and increasing age Cather became convinced that the beliefs and way of life she valued were disappearing. This disillusionment is poignantly evident in her novel The Professor's House (1925). She subsequently turned to North America's far past for her material: to colonial New Mexico in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), widely regarded as her masterpiece, and to 17th-century Quebec for Shadows on the Rock (1931), in both novels blending history with religious reverence and loving characterizations. The volumes My Mortal Enemy (1926) and The Old Beauty and Others (1948) present her highly skilled shorter fiction. Her intense interest in the craft of fiction is shown in the essays in Not Under Forty (1936) and On Writing (1949). Cather herself was a master of that craft, her novels and stories written in a pellucid style of great charm and stateliness.

Bibliography

See E. K. Brown and L. Edel, Willa Cather: A Critical Biography (1980); S. O'Brien, Willa Cather: the Emerging Voice (1987); J. Woodres, Willa Cather: A Literary Life (1989).

(1873-1947)

1905	The Troll Garden. Cather publishes her first work of fiction, a story collection dealing with the impact of the insensitive and vulgar on beauty and the imagination. Included are some of Cather's finest stories, such as "The Sculptor's Funeral," "A Wagner Matinée," and, arguably her finest, "Paul's Case."
1912	Alexander's Bridge. Cather's first novel presents a romantic triangle--a bridge engineer is divided between his loyalty to his wife and his passion for an old flame. Cather would not value the book very highly, later saying that she had actually written two first novels, this one and O Pioneers! (1913), her first to make major use of a Nebraska setting.
1913	O Pioneers! Cather's second novel is her first to reflect her Nebraska childhood. The story concerns Alexandra Bergson, a Swedish immigrant who struggles to keep her family together. Cather wrote in a friend's copy of the novel, "This was the first time I walked off on my own feet--everything before was half real and half imitation of writers whom I admired. In this one I hit the home pasture."
1915	The Song of the Lark. Cather's third novel traces the hard-fought struggle of Thea Kronborg of Moonstone, Colorado, to become an international opera singer. The childhood scenes are based on Cather's own, and Thea's youthful aspirations also echo the author's. Cather would later regard the novel as one of her favorites but a failure, particularly in its depiction of Thea's eventual success.
1918	My Ántonia. Cather produces one of her most enduring works in this reconstruction of her own Nebraska childhood and youth as reflected by an immigrant Bohemian girl and her friend Jim Burden. Her characters embody both the pioneer past that has been lost and a universal principle of undaunted vitality and regeneration.
1920	Youth and Bright Medusa. Cather's collection of new stories as well as old favorites, such as "Paul's Case" and "A Wagner Matinée," is organized by the themes of youth and art.
1922	One of Ours. Cather wins a Pulitzer Prize for this novel about a young man's escape from the stultifying Midwest to redemption at the front during World War I. Her war scenes are criticized by some, including Ernest Hemingway, as overly idealized and unauthentic.
1923	A Lost Lady. Some critics have asserted that this novel--about the wife of a railroad pioneer seen through the adoring eyes of a young boy as she coarsens over time--is Cather's masterpiece. It stands as a poignant elegy for the passing of the heroic pioneer age and an indictment of the corruption of modern life, which Cather increasingly lamented. She would observe that for her "the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts."
1925	The Professor's House. Reflecting the author's increasing disillusionment with the modern world, the novel describes a college professor's midlife crisis, prompted by his move to a new home. Critic Alfred Kazin would consider the novel the "most persistently underrated" of Cather's works, in which her protagonist "is at once the archetype of all her characters and the embodiment of her own beliefs."
1926	My Mortal Enemy. In what is perhaps Cather's bitterest novel, Myra Driscoll, an old woman who previously eloped, looks back on her life and regrets ever having married for love.
1927	Death Comes for the Archbishop. Many regard this novel, based on the life and achievement of Archbishop Lamy of Sante Fe, New Mexico, the author's masterpiece. It is the first of three historical novels she would produce, an episodic novel without a conventional plot but relying on a series of highly visual scenes that the author likened to frescoes.
1931	Shadows on the Rocks. Increasingly drawn to the past for the heroism and ideals she wishes to celebrate and finds lacking in the present, Cather dramatizes a year in the lives of a widowed apothecary and his twelve-year-old daughter in late-seventeenth-century Quebec.
1932	Obscure Destinies. Cather's three long stories are linked by western rural settings and by dealing with protagonists who contend with the challenges of their environments. The book is warmly received as a return to the author's strengths.
1935	Lucy Gayheart. Cather's novel about a pianist's unhappy affair with a married concert singer displays the author's characteristic interest in the artistic temperament, but critics divide over the book's achievement. Some praise the honesty of the love relationship; others complain about the novel's predictability and sentimentality.
1936	Not Under Forty. The writer explains her theory of fiction and influences with interpretive essays on writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett, Katherine Mansfield, and Thomas Mann. The title refers to the author's contention that her book will be of interest only to those age forty or older.
1940	Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Cather's last novel, a story set in Virginia during the 1850s and concerning the persecution of a beautiful mulatto slave by a jealous white woman, receives mixed reviews and proves less enduring than her previous works.
1948	The Old Beauty and Others. The last three short stories written by the author are published to a mixed reception. Some view them as a fitting valediction for a beloved writer; others believe they add little to her stature.

Quotes:

"Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole -- so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page."

"Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family --but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything."

"The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young."

"That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great."

"Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine."

"No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person."

See more famous quotes by Willa Cather

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