Willa Cather - Classic Literature Willa Cather
Willa Cather is undoubtedly one of the most important American writers of the late Nineteenth Century and into the Twentieth Century. She enjoyed successful careers as a journalist, editor and teacher, but it is her fiction that gained her enduring notoriety. Her novels documented life in the Midwest and featured a somewhat unconventional narrative style. She continues to be Nebraska’s most celebrated author.
Willa Sibert Cather was born on December 7th 1873, the first of seven children born to Charles and Virginia Cather. She was raised in the small farming community of Back Creek Valley, near Winchester, Virginia until the age of nine, when her family moved to Webster County, Nebraska. A year later, they moved to Red Cloud, a railroad town that provided the setting and characters for most of her fictional work.
Cather defied convention from an early age, resisting her mother’s attempts to mold her into the stereotypical female role of the era. Cather was anything but a lady, wearing trousers and sporting short hair when neither was deemed appropriate for women. She also experienced confusion regarding her sexual identity, often dressing and passing as a man.
She graduated high school in 1890 and moved to Lincoln to attend the University of Nebraska, where she initially arrived dressed as ‘William’. She studied the classics and graduated in 1895.
Whilst at university, Cather began her distinguished career as a journalist. She edited the university magazine and wrote stories to fill space in each edition, wrote a weekly column for the Nebraska State Journal and worked as a drama critic for the Lincoln Journal. It was also during this period (1892) that she first published fiction outside of Nebraska – ‘Peter’, later to be incorporated in My Antonia, was published in a Boston magazine.
Following her graduation, Cather returned home to Red Cloud for a brief spell before moving to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to pursue a career in journalism. She worked as a staff writer for Home Monthly and theater critic for the Daily Leader. After five years as a journalist, Cather gave up journalism in favour of teaching. She taught Latin and English at Central High School and Allegheny High School before moving to New York in 1906.
It was during her time in Pittsburgh that Cather had the first of her books of fiction published. Her only work of poetry, April Twilights, was her debut in 1903, and was followed by The Troll Garden in 1905. The latter was a collection of short stories written since her arrival in Pittsburgh, and facilitated her departure to New York.
S.S. McClure, the owner of a prominent magazine in New York, had read Cather’s book and offered her a position. She worked there for five years, eventually being promoted to managing editor. In 1912, however, Cather made the decision to spend time on her own writing and left her journalism career behind. She published her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, later that year.
Cather’s early fiction celebrated the life of immigrants on the midwestern landscape. O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915) and My Antonia (1918) all portray the immigrant experience of settling on the Plains, and a way of life that was dying by the time she wrote about it.
Her early novels also highlight the unique nature and beauty of the landscape, as well as the beauty of its heroines. Each story contained a celebration of strong womanhood and, embodied in each of her heroines, the heart and the home. However, the tone and content of her work altered dramatically after 1922.
Cather’s disillusionment with society and the new trends of consumerism and materialism, along with ill health, marked a departure from her previous work. She celebrated alternative values in A Lost Lady (1923) and The Professor’s House (1925). The main protagonists of both novels experienced cultural and spiritual crises similar to those that Cather perceived in society.
A third phase of Cather’s work began in 1927 with her novel Death Comes for the Archbishop. The novel was historical but effectively dealt with the tensions between the old and new values. Her disenchantment with the modern world continued into her next novel, Shadows on the Rock (1931). Cather’s final novel was published in 1940 (Sapphira and the Slave Girl), seven years before her death.
Whilst Cather never married, she did form a life-long companionship with Edith Lewis whilst in New York. She lived with Lewis for forty years until her own death in 1947. Their friendship provided an ongoing theme in much of Cather’s work.
Willa Cather died of a cerebral haemorrhage on April 24th 1947. She was aged 73.
Cather has been highly decorated for her fiction, both in life and following her death. She won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours in 1923, a book about a Midwestern boy who enlisted to fight in World War I. Posthumously, she was the first woman to be inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame in 1961 and has also been inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners in Okalahoma (1974) and the National Women’s Hall of Fame in New York (1988). She is still considered one of America’s great authors.
