Willa Cather

Wilella Silbert Cather
Willacather.jpg}} | Cather in 1936.
Born	December 7, 1873 near Winchester, Virginia, USA
Died	April 24, 1947 New York City, New York, USA
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	American
Writing period	1912-1947

Wilella Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873^[1] – April 24, 1947) is an eminent author from the United States. She is perhaps best known for her depictions of U.S. life in novels such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Early life

Willa Cather was born on a small farm in 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 born Mary Virginia Boak (d. 1931), and she had six younger children: 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. There, she spent the rest of her childhood in the same town that has been made famous by her writing. She insisted on attending college, so her family borrowed money so she could enroll at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. While there, she became a regular contributor to the Nebraska State Journal. She then moved to Pittsburgh, where she taught high school English and worked for Home Monthly, and eventually got a job offer from McClure's Magazine in New York City. The latter publication serialized her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, which was heavily influenced by Henry James. Cather was born into the Baptist faith but converted to Episcopalianism in 1922, having begun to attend Sunday services in the church as early as 1906.^[3]

Writing career

Cather moved to New York City in 1906 in order to join the editorial staff of McClure's and later became the managing editor (1908). As a journalist, she co-authored a powerful and highly critical biography of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. It was serialized in McClure's in 1907-8 and published as a book the next year. Christian Scientists were outraged and tried to buy every copy; it was reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press in 1993. She met author Sarah Orne Jewett, who advised Cather to rely less on the influence of James and more on her native Nebraska. For her novels she returned to the prairie for inspiration, and these works became popular and critical successes. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours (1922). She was celebrated by critics like H.L. Mencken for writing about ordinary people in plainspoken language. When he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Sinclair Lewis said Cather should have won it instead. However, later critics tended to favor more experimental authors and attacked Cather, a political conservative, for ignoring the actual plight of ordinary people. In 1973, Willa Cather was honored by the United States Postal Service with her image on a postage stamp. Cather is a member of the Nebraska Hall of Fame. In 1986, she was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. She was a close companion to opera singer Olive Fremstad.

Personal life

As a student at the University of Nebraska in the early 1890s, Cather sometimes used the masculine nickname "William" and wore masculine clothes. ^[4] A photograph in the University of Nebraska archives depicts Cather, "her hair shingled, at a time when long hair was fashionable, and dressed boyishly." ^[5] Throughout Cather's adult life, her most significant relationships were with women, such as her college friend Louise Pound, the Pittsburgh socialite Isabelle McClung, with whom Cather traveled to Europe, and most notably the editor Edith Lewis. Cather's friendship 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, Lewis afterwards serving as the literary trustee for the Cather estate.^[6] 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.^[7] Cather is buried in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. 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 written about Cather's sexual orientation and the influence of her female friendships on her work. ^[8]

Trivia

• In 1981 the US Mint created the Willa Cather Medallion. A half-ounce gold coin. Many have been melted down by collectors for the gold.

The 1981 Willa Cather half-ounce gold coin.

• From 1913 to 1927, she lived at No. 5 Bank Street in Greenwich Village, until the apartment was torn down during the construction of the Seventh Avenue subway line.^[9]
• After reading her cousin G.P. Cather's wartime letters home to his mother, wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning "One of Ours". He was Nebraska's first officer killed in World War I. Those same letters are now held in the George Cather Ray Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries.
• Cather and Pound residence halls at the University of Nebraska (Lincoln) are named after Willa Cather and Louise Pound. [1]

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

Novels

• Alexander's Bridge (1912)
• 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 (poetry) 1903
• The Troll Garden (short stories) 1905
• Youth and the Bright Medusa (short stories) 1920
• Obscure Destinies (three stories) 1932
• The Old Beauty (three stories) 1948

This was Cather's last (posthumous) published work.

This does not include recent collections of early stories which were originally published in periodicals.^{[10] [11]}

References

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
• Prairie to Paris An Interactive Exploration of Willa's and Antonia's Prairie
• Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation in Red Cloud, Nebraska
• Willa Cather Quotes
• American Masters - Willa Cather
• Works by Willa Cather at Project Gutenberg
• glbtq article on Willa Cather with special focus on her possible lesbianism
• Willa Cather birthplace
• LitWeb.net: Willa Cather Biography
• Willa Cather papers at Nebraska State Historical Society