Willa Cather was born near Winchester, Virginia, on December 7, 1873. She was the oldest of seven children. When Cather was nine years old, her family moved to Nebraska, where they lived on a farm in rural Webster County and in a nearby town, Red Cloud. The population of Webster County and Red Cloud represented a diverse array of regions and nations. Cather's neighbors included immigrants from Sweden, France, and Germany, as well as Americans who had moved to Nebraska from large cities in New England and small towns from the South, as the Cathers had.

As a teenager, Cather was a tomboy. At fifteen, she signed her name "William CatherM.D." When she entered the University of Nebraska in Lincoln in 1891, she wore her hair short and dressed in men's clothes. By 1895, when she graduated from college, she had discarded her masculine persona in favor of more...