Born in Virginia in 1873. Willa Cather spent the first decade of her life on her family's farm in Back Creek Valley. In 1884, her family moved to join her father's relatives among the ethnically diverse settlers of the Great Plains. This area would serve as the inspiration for several of her novels, including My Antonia (1918). Her father tried farming but soon settled the family in Red Cloud. Nebraska. a town of approximately 2.500 people. Cather remembered vividly both the trauma of leaving a hill farm for a flat, empty land and the subsequent excitement of growing up in the new country. She took intense pleasure in riding her pony to neighboring farms and listening to the stories of the immigrant farm women she met there. Cather accompanied a local doctor on house calls and by her thirteenth birthday had adopted the outward appearance and manner of a male...