Willa Cather

Wilella Cather, known from childhood as Willa, was born on December 7, 1873, in the Back Creek Valley near Gore, Virginia, the eldest of seven children of Charles Cather and Mary Virginia Boak ^[1]. Her family had farmed in the Shenandoah region for generations, raising sheep on land the Cathers had held since before the Civil War. Anyone asking who was Willa Cather usually begins with what happened next: in 1883, when she was nine, the family joined relatives who had already moved west and settled in Webster County, Nebraska ^[2].

The move shocked her. She later described the treeless prairie as a country stripped of everything familiar, and the memory of that first year on the open Divide shaped nearly everything she wrote ^[3]. After eighteen months of farming, her father gave up the homestead and moved the family into the small railroad town of Red Cloud, where he opened a loan and insurance office. There Willa grew up among Bohemian, Scandinavian, German, and French Canadian immigrants whose stories she absorbed on visits to neighboring farms ^[2].

She was a striking, independent child. For several years in her teens she cropped her hair, signed herself William Cather, and announced plans to become a surgeon, assisting the local doctors on their rounds ^[1]. In 1890 she left Red Cloud for Lincoln to prepare for the University of Nebraska. A professor submitted one of her essays, on Thomas Carlyle, to a Lincoln newspaper without telling her; seeing her words in print, she later said, turned her ambitions from medicine to writing ^[3].

At the University of Nebraska, Cather edited the student literary magazine and, while still an undergraduate, wrote drama criticism for the Nebraska State Journal at a dollar a column. Her reviews were so sharp that touring theater companies reportedly dreaded playing Lincoln ^[1]. She graduated in 1895 and, after a restless year back in Red Cloud, took a job in Pittsburgh in 1896 editing a women's magazine called the Home Monthly ^[2].

Pittsburgh gave her a decade of apprenticeship. She moved from the Home Monthly to the telegraph desk and drama column of the Pittsburgh Leader, then in 1901 traded journalism for the steadier hours of teaching, first at Central High School and later at Allegheny High School ^[2]. During these years she published April Twilights (1903), a volume of poems, and The Troll Garden (1905), a collection of stories about artists and the punishing distance between talent and provincial life ^[4]. One of its stories, Paul's Case, remains among her most anthologized works.

The collection caught the attention of S. S. McClure, the volcanic publisher of McClure's Magazine, who brought her to New York in 1906. Within two years she was managing editor of the most famous muckraking magazine in America, running the office during McClure's long absences ^[1]. The job made her a significant figure in New York publishing, but it left little time to write. A meeting with the Maine author Sarah Orne Jewett in 1908 proved decisive: Jewett advised her to leave the magazine, find her own quiet center of life, and write from the material she knew most deeply ^[3]. Cather took the advice, resigning in 1912.

Any account of Willa Cather achievements starts with the prairie trilogy she wrote once she stopped imitating other writers. Her first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912), was a Jamesian story of a Boston engineer that she soon disowned as artificial. With O Pioneers! (1913) she turned home. The novel follows Alexandra Bergson, a Swedish immigrant who holds her family's Nebraska land through drought and doubt, and it announced a new subject in American fiction: the epic of the farming frontier told through women's lives ^[4].

The Song of the Lark (1915) traced the making of an opera singer from a Colorado railroad town, drawing on Cather's friendship with the Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad ^[2]. Then came My Ántonia (1918), her most beloved book, narrated by a lawyer remembering the Bohemian hired girl who embodied everything vital about his childhood on the Divide. Critics from H. L. Mencken onward treated it as a landmark, and it has never gone out of print ^[4].

One of Ours (1922), the story of a Nebraska farm boy who finds purpose as a soldier in France, won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1923 ^[5]. The decade that followed was astonishingly productive: A Lost Lady (1923), The Professor's House (1925), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), her serene chronicle of two French missionary priests in nineteenth century New Mexico, which many scholars judge her masterpiece ^[1]. Shadows on the Rock (1931), set in seventeenth century Quebec, brought her the Prix Femina Américain in 1933, and in 1944 the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded her its gold medal for fiction ^[2].

Cather guarded her privacy with unusual determination. She never married, and the central relationships of her life were with women. In Pittsburgh she lived for several years in the household of Isabelle McClung, a judge's daughter to whom she remained devoted until McClung's death in 1938 ^[3]. In New York she shared an apartment with the editor Edith Lewis from 1908 until her own death, a companionship of nearly forty years; Lewis later wrote a memoir, Willa Cather Living, and served as her literary executor ^[6].

Her routines were steady rather than glamorous. She wrote in the mornings, usually for no more than three hours, and spent decades at 5 Bank Street in Greenwich Village before moving to Park Avenue ^[6]. Summers took her away from the city: to Red Cloud to see family, to the Southwest whose mesas fed Death Comes for the Archbishop, and from 1922 onward to Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick, where she and Lewis built a cottage ^[2]. She also returned often to Jaffrey, New Hampshire, writing portions of My Ántonia in a tent pitched in a meadow there ^[6].

In later life she grew openly hostile to publicity. She burned letters, asked friends to destroy her correspondence, and wrote a will restricting quotation from surviving letters, a barrier that stood until a scholarly edition of her correspondence appeared in 2013 ^[7]. Biographers including James Woodress and Hermione Lee have read the fiction and the surviving papers closely, though Cather herself insisted the work, not the life, was what mattered ^[3].

The 1930s tested her. Marxist critics dismissed her as a nostalgic escapist out of step with the Depression, a judgment she answered obliquely in the essay collection Not Under Forty (1936), whose title warned that readers under that age might not follow her ^[3]. Personal losses accumulated in the same years: her father died in 1928, her mother after a long paralysis in 1931, her brother Douglass in 1938, and Isabelle McClung that same year. She told friends that 1938 broke something in her that never fully mended ^[1].

She kept writing. Obscure Destinies (1932) gathered three Nebraska stories, including Neighbour Rosicky, that rank with her best work. Lucy Gayheart (1935) returned to the theme of a small town musician's ambitions, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), her final novel, went back further than any other book, to the Virginia of her grandmothers and to a slaveholding household in the 1850s ^[4].

An inflamed tendon in her right hand, which forced her to wear a brace and curtailed her writing through much of the 1940s, along with wartime anxieties and gall bladder surgery in 1942, slowed her final years ^[2]. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage at her Park Avenue apartment in Manhattan on April 24, 1947, at seventy three ^[8]. At her request she was buried not in Nebraska but in the old cemetery at Jaffrey, New Hampshire, beneath an epitaph drawn from My Ántonia: that is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great ^[6].

Basic Willa Cather facts, twelve novels, some sixty stories, a Pulitzer Prize, only hint at her standing. Her reputation, which sagged in the politicized 1930s, recovered steadily after her death, and she is now placed among the major American novelists of the twentieth century. Death Comes for the Archbishop appears regularly on lists of the century's best English language fiction, and My Ántonia is a fixture of American classrooms ^[4].

Her craft has proved durably influential. In the 1922 essay The Novel Démeublé she argued for fiction stripped of furniture, where the thing not named on the page does the deepest work, a principle of suppression and suggestion that anticipated later minimalist aesthetics ^[3]. Writers as different as Wallace Stegner, Marilynne Robinson, and A. S. Byatt have acknowledged her example, and scholars of women's writing, queer studies, and the literature of place all claim her ^[7].

Her world is also physically preserved. The National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska maintains the largest collection of nationally designated historic sites devoted to an American author, including her childhood home and the restored opera house where she gave her high school oration ^[9]. The Willa Cather Archive at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln publishes her complete journalism, letters, and scholarly editions online ^[10]. Any full Willa Cather biography ends where she began: with the red grass of the Divide, which she once feared and then made unforgettable.