Willa Cather
American novelist of the Great Plains and pioneer experience.
Willa Sibert Cather (born Wilella Sibert Cather; December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) was an American author celebrated for her novels set on the Great Plains, such as O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours, a World War I novel. Her work often focused on the frontier and pioneer experience, capturing the spirit of 19th-century settlers, many of them European immigrants, as they moved westward. Nostalgia and exile are recurring themes, and landscapes and domestic spaces in her fiction act as dynamic forces shaping her characters’ struggles and sense of community.
Cather was born in 1873 on her maternal grandmother’s farm in Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia. Her father, Charles Fectigue Cather, traced his Welsh ancestry to Cadair Idris, a mountain in Gwynedd. Her mother, Mary Virginia Boak, had been a school teacher. When Willa was a year old, the family moved to Willow Shade, a Greek Revival home on 130 acres near Winchester, given to them by her paternal grandparents. Mary Cather had six more children: Roscoe, Douglass, Jessica, James, John, and Elsie. Willa was closer to her brothers than to her sisters, whom biographer Hermione Lee noted she “seems not to have liked very much.”
When Cather was nine, her paternal grandparents urged the family to move to Nebraska in 1883. They wanted farmland and to escape tuberculosis outbreaks in Virginia. Her father tried farming for 18 months, then moved the family to Red Cloud, where he opened a real estate and insurance business, and the children attended school for the first time. Cather’s earliest work appeared in the local paper, the Red Cloud Chief. She read widely, thanks to a Jewish couple, the Wieners, who gave her unlimited access to their library. She also accompanied a local doctor on house calls and decided to become a surgeon. For a short time, she signed her name as William, but soon settled on “Willa.”
After graduating from Red Cloud High School in 1890 at age 16, she enrolled at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In her first year, an essay on Thomas Carlyle was published in the Nebraska State Journal without her knowledge. She then began writing columns for a dollar each, finding that seeing her words in print had “a kind of hypnotic effect” that pushed her to keep writing.
Quick Facts
- Birth name
- Wilella Sibert Cather
- Born
- 7 December 1873
- Birthplace
- Gore, Virginia, U.S.
- Died
- 24 April 1947
- Place of death
- New York City, U.S.
- Resting place
- Jaffrey, New Hampshire, U.S.
- Occupation
- Novelist
- Partner
- Edith Lewis (c. 1908–1947)
Facts from the source article.
Lore & Background
Cather was born in 1873 on her maternal grandmother's farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia. When she was nine years old, her family moved to Webster County, Nebraska, later settling as homesteaders in the town of Red Cloud. After graduating from the University of Nebraska, she moved to Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At age 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, and is buried with Lewis in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.
Cather's early work included journalism and teaching. Her first book, a poetry collection called April Twilights, appeared in 1903, followed by her first short story collection, The Troll Garden, in 1905. She worked at McClure's Magazine, where her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, was serialized in 1912. She then published three novels set in the Great Plains—O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918)—sometimes called her 'Prairie Trilogy.' In 1920, dissatisfied with her publisher Houghton Mifflin, she turned to Alfred A. Knopf, which supported her through advertising campaigns and produced books whose design she appreciated.
Reader's Guide
Cather's significance lies in her literary treatment of the American frontier and pioneer experience, particularly the lives of European immigrants settling the Great Plains. Common themes in her work include nostalgia and exile, and a sense of place is an important element: landscapes and domestic spaces become dynamic presences against which her characters struggle and find community. Her novels drew praise for their plainspoken language about ordinary people; Sinclair Lewis lauded her for making Nebraska accessible to the wider world for the first time. After writing The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald lamented that it was a failure in comparison to My Ántonia. Cather's legacy endures through her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel One of Ours and her continued readership as a chronicler of the pioneer spirit and the immigrant experience in the American West.
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