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).

For more information on Willa Cather, visit Britannica.com.

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.

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

Willa Siebert Cather
Cather in 1936.
Born	Wilella Siebert Cather December 7, 1873(1873-12-07) near Winchester, Virginia, United States
Died	April 24, 1947 (aged 73) New York City, New York, United States
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	American
Writing period	1905 - 1947

Willa Siebert Cather (December 7, 1873^[1] – April 24, 1947) was an American author who grew up in Nebraska. She is best known for her depictions of frontier life on the Great Plains in novels such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Writing career 3 Personal life 4 Legacy 5 Bibliography 5.1 Nonfiction 5.2 Novels 5.3 Collections 6 See also 7 References 8 External links

Biography

Born Wilella Siebert Cather in 1873 on a small farm in the Back Creek valley near Winchester, Virginia. Her father was Charles Fectigue Cather (d. 1928), whose family had lived on land in the valley for six generations. Her mother was Mary Virginia Boak (d. 1931). Mary had six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass, Jessica, James, John, and Elsie.^[2] In 1883, Cather moved with her family to Catherton in Webster County, Nebraska. The following year the family relocated to Red Cloud, the county seat. Cather spent the rest of her childhood in the town which she later made famous by her writing career. When Willa Cather insisted on attending college, her family borrowed money for her to attend the University of Nebraska.

While in college, Cather became a regular contributor to the Nebraska State Journal. Later she moved to Pittsburgh. After receiving a job offer from McClure's Magazine, she moved to New York City for her career. McClure's Magazine serialized her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, a work heavily influenced by her admiration for the style of Henry James.

Cather was born into a Baptist family, but in 1922 joined the Episcopal Church. After moving to New York, she began to attend Sunday services in the Episcopal Church as early as 1906.^[3]

Cather died on April 24, 1947 in New York City of a cerebral hemorrhage and was buried in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.^[4][5]

Writing career

Cather moved to join the editorial staff of McClure's and in 1908 was promoted to managing editor. As a journalist, she co-authored, alongside Georgina M. Wells, a critical biography of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. It was serialized in McClure's in 1907-8 and published the next year as a book. Christian Scientists were outraged and tried to buy up every copy. The work was reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press in 1993. In 1942 Cather met a variety of authors in New York. Sarah Orne Jewett advised her to rely less on the influence of Henry James and more on her own experiences in Nebraska. For her novels, Cather returned to the prairie for inspiration and also drew on her experiences in France. These works became both popular and critical successes.

In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, published in 1922. This work had been inspired by reading her cousin G.P. Cather's wartime letters home to his mother. He was the first officer from Nebraska killed in World War I. Those letters are now held in the George Cather Ray Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries.

Cather was celebrated by critics like H.L. Mencken for writing in plainspoken language about ordinary people. When novelist Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he paid homage to her by saying that Cather should have won the honor.

Later critics tended to favor more experimental authors. In times of political activism some agreed with Cather, a political conservative, for writing about conditions of ordinary people, rather than working to change them.

Personal life

As a student at the University of Nebraska in the early 1890s, Cather sometimes used the masculine nickname "William" and wore masculine clothing. ^[6] A photograph in the University of Nebraska archives depicts Cather, "her hair shingled, at a time when females wore their hair fashionably long, and dressed boyishly." ^[7]

Throughout Cather's adult life, her most significant friendships were with women. These included her college friend, Louise Pound; the Pittsburgh socialite, Isabelle McClung, with whom Cather traveled to Europe; opera singer Olive Fremstad; and most notably, the editor Edith Lewis. Cather's sexual identity remains, however, a point of contention amongst scholars with many arguing for Cather as a lesbian and interpreting her work through a lens of queer theory while a highly vocal contingent of Cather scholars adamantly oppose such considerations.

Professor Janet Sharistanian has written, "Cather did not label herself a lesbian nor would she wish us to do so, and we do not know whether her relationships with women were sexual. In any case, it is anachronistic to assume that if Cather's historical context had been different, she would have chosen to write overtly about homoerotic love." ^[8]

Cather's relationship with Lewis began in the early 1900s. The two women lived together in a series of apartments in New York City from 1912 until the writer's death in 1947. From 1913 to 1927, Cather and Lewis lived at No. 5 Bank Street in Greenwich Village. They had to move as the apartment was to be taken down during construction of the Seventh Avenue subway line.^[9] Lewis later served as the literary trustee for the Cather estate.^[10]

In her later life, Cather spent summers on Grand Manan Island, in New Brunswick, Canada, in the Bay of Fundy, where she owned a cottage in Whale Cove.^[11]

A resolutely private person, Cather destroyed many old drafts, personal papers, and letters. Her will restricted the ability of scholars to quote from those personal papers that remain. Since the 1980s, feminist and other academic writers have explored Cather's sexual orientation and the influence of her female friendships on her work. Most recently, her work has been viewed at the vanguard of Ecocriticism, a contemporary theoretical approach to the analysis of art that seeks out ecological awareness. [1]

Cather received many honorary degrees, beginning with a doctorate from the University of Nebraska in 1917. She also received degrees from University of Michigan, Columbia, Yale, California-Berkeley, Princeton, (the first to receive an honorary degree) and Smith College. [2]

Legacy

Cather received both national and state honors. In 1973, the United States Postal Service honored Willa Cather by using her image on a postage stamp. In 1981 the U.S. Mint created the Willa Cather medallion, a half-ounce gold coin.

Willa Cather half-ounce gold coin.

Cather was elected to the Nebraska Hall of Fame. In 1986, Cather was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. Her alma mater, the University of Nebraska, named residence halls after both Cather and her college friend, Louise Pound. Pound had a lifelong career as professor of English at the university and was the first woman president of the Modern Language Association.^[12] The Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation (now the Willa Cather Foundation) was founded in 1955 to support the study of her life and work and the maintain many sites in her hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska.

Bibliography

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)
• Not Under Forty (1936, essays)
• On Writing (1949, reprint U Nebraska Press, 1988)

Novels

• Alexander's Bridge (1912)
• "The Prairie Trilogy":
  • 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)

Collections

• April Twilights (1903, poetry)
• The Troll Garden (1905, short stories)
• Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920, short stories)
• Obscure Destinies (1932, three stories)
• Not Under Forty (1946, essays)
• The Old Beauty (1948, three stories)
• Willa Cather: On Writing (1949, essays)

This does not include recent collections of early stories which were originally published in periodicals.^{[13] [14]}

See also

• Willa Cather Birthplace at Gore, Virginia
• Willa Cather House at Red Cloud, Nebraska

References

1. ^ Woodress, James Leslie. Willa Cather: A ilLiterary Life, University of Nebraska Press, Omaha, 1987, p. 516. Cather's birth date is confirmed by a birth certificate and a 22 January 1874 letter of her father's referring to her. While working at McClure's Magazine, Cather claimed to be born in 1875. After 1920 she claimed 1876 as her birth year. That is the date carved into her gravestone at Jaffrey, New Hampshire.
2. ^ Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record, pp. 5-7. Alfred Knopf, New York, 1953.
3. ^ Acocella, Joan. Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, p. 84. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2000.
4. ^ "Willa Cather, Novelist, Dies Of Stroke At 70". Chicago Tribune. April 25, 1947. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/chicagotribune/access/473858882.html?dids=473858882:473858882&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:AI&type=historic&date=Apr+25%2C+1947&author=&pub=Chicago+Tribune&desc=WILLA+CATHER%2C+NOVELIST%2C+DIES+OF+STROKE+AT+70&pqatl=google. Retrieved 2009-12-10. "Willa Cather, one of America's foremost novelists and short story writers died here today, reportedly of a cerebral hemorrhage. Miss Cather, who had ..." 
5. ^ "Willa Cather, Novelist, Dies At 70 Received Pulitzer Prize In 1922". Associated Press in the Hartford Courant. April 25, 1947. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/courant/access/903401822.html?dids=903401822:903401822&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:AI&type=historic&date=Apr+25%2C+1947&author=&pub=Hartford+Courant&desc=Willa+Cather%2C+Novelist%2C+Dies+At+70+Received+Pulitzer+Prize+In+1922&pqatl=google. Retrieved 2009-12-10. "Willa Cather, 70, one of the Nation's foremost novelists, died here today." 
6. ^ O'Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford, 1987. pp. 96-113.
7. ^ Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record, p. 38. Alfred Knopf, New York, 1953.
8. ^ Sharistanian, Janet. Introduction to My Ántonia, p. xiii. Oxford University Press, New York, 2006.
9. ^ Bunyan, Patrick. All Around the Town: Amazing Manhattan Facts and Curiosities, p. 66. Fordham University Press, New York, 1999.
10. ^ "Cather's Life: Chronology." The Willa Cather Archive, University of Nebraska. 21 March 2007 (http://cather.unl.edu)
11. ^ Ahern, Amy, "Willa Cather: Longer Biographical Sketch." The Willa Cather Archive, University of Nebraska. 21 March 2007 (http://cather.unl.edu).
12. ^ Cather and Pound Halls, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
13. ^ "Cather's Life: Chronology". The Willa Cather Archive. http://cather.unl.edu/life/chronology.html. Retrieved 2007-08-13. 
14. ^ "Cather's Writings: Short Fiction". The Willa Cather Archive. http://cather.unl.edu/writings/shortfiction/index.html. Retrieved 2007-08-13. 

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Willa Cather

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Willa Cather

• Willa Cather Archive at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation in Red Cloud, Nebraska
• Works by or about Willa Cather at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions color illustrated)
• Works by Willa Cather at Project Gutenberg (plain text, HTML and audio)
• Works by or about Willa Cather in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• The Willa Cather Collection at Drew University, Madison, NJ
• Willa Cather papers at Nebraska State Historical Society
• Willa Cather at Poets' Corner
• Willa Cather at Find a Grave

v • d • e Works by Willa Cather Novels: Alexander's Bridge · O Pioneers! · The Song of the Lark · My Ántonia · One of Ours · A Lost Lady · The Professor's House · My Mortal Enemy · Death Comes for the Archbishop · Shadows on the Rock · Lucy Gayheart · Sapphira and the Slave Girl Short stories: "Peter" · "Lou, the Prophet" · "The Elopement of Allen Poole" · "A Tale of the White Pyramid" · "A Son of the Celestial" · "The Clemency of the Court" · "The Fear That Walks by Noonday" · "On the Divide" · "A Night at Greenway Court" · "Tommy, the Unsentimental" · "The Princess Baladina - Her Adventure" · "The Count of Crow's Nest" · "The Burglar's Christmas" · "The Strategy of the Were-Wolf Dog" · "A Resurrection" · "The Prodigies" · "Nanette: An Aside" · "The Way of the World" · "The Westbound Train" · "Eric Hermannson's Soul" · "The Dance at Chevalier's" · "The Sentimentality of William Tavener" · "The Affair at Grover Station" · "A Singer's Romance" · "The Conversion of Sum Loo" · "Jack-a-Boy" · "El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional" · "The Professor's Commencement" · "The Treasure of Far Island" · "A Death in the Desert" · "A Wagner Matinee" · "The Sculptor's Funeral" · "Flavia and Her Artists" · "The Garden Lodge" · "The Marriage of Phaedra" · "Paul's Case" · "The Namesake" · "The Profile" · "The Willing Muse" · "Eleanor's House" · "On the Gulls' Road" · "The Enchanted Bluff" · "The Joy of Nelly Deane" · "Behind the Singer Tower" · "The Bohemian Girl" · "Consequences" · "The Bookkeeper's Wife" · "The Diamond Mine" · "A Gold Slipper" · "Ardessa" · "Scandal" · "Her Boss" · "Coming, Eden Bower!" · "Uncle Valentine" · "Double Birthday" · "Neighbour Rosicky" · "Two Friends" · "The Old Beauty" · "Before Breakfast" · "The Best Years" Collection of poems: April Twilights Non-fiction: On Writing · Not Under Forty Collaborations: The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science

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