Willa Cather, one of the most significant American novelists of the 20th century, created a legacy of influential fiction that is at once simple and refined. Her perceptive prose captures the pioneer spirit of the frontier settlers of the American plains and conveys vivid portraits of early American landscapes of the Southwest. Influenced by regional writer Sarah Orne Jewett (The Country of the Pointed Firs, 1896) and the narrative techniques of Henry James, Cather’s work is largely autobiographical, unwavering in artistry, and recognized for memorable character portrayals.
At age nine Cather and her family moved west to the Nebraska frontier, and when she was ten the family settled in Red Cloud. For Cather, the shift from genteel Virginia to the unsettled prairies of Nebraska was an “erasure of personality.” Yet Red Cloud, with its opera house, railroad depots, and immigrant population, served as Cather’s recurrent setting for several of her short stories and novels.
Willa Cather at University of Nebraska
In 1890, Cather entered University of Nebraska, and graduated in 1895. She began her career as a professional journalist for the Nebraska State Journal in 1893, later becoming its drama critic. That same year she became managing editor of the university’s literary magazine, The Hesperian.
Leaving Nebraska for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1896, Cather took the position as editor of the women’s journal, Home Monthly, in which she published her early fiction. Her love of theater enticed her to work as drama and music critic for the Pittsburgh Leader until 1900. She left journalism from 1901-06 and taught high school.
During that time Cather published her first book, the volume of poems April Twilights (1903), and in 1905, she published her first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden. Its success led to her appointment as managing editor of McClure's Magazine, a New York muckraking monthly. She left McClure’s in 1912 to dedicate herself to writing novels.
Willa Cather Finds Inspiration in the American Southwest
Cather traveled to the Southwest in 1912. The region’s canyons and cliff dwellings, Native American and Spanish folklore, and missionary priests impressed Cather. She used these influences to frame the textures of The Song of the Lark (1915), The Professor's House (1925), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), widely considered her masterpiece.
Her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge (1913), published when Cather was 38, concerns the themes of yearning and irreconcilable disparities in personality. She returned to these ideas in One of Ours (1922), winner of the 1923 Pulitzer Prize; A Lost Lady (1923); My Mortal Enemy (1926); and Lucy Gayheart (1935).
The renowned O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918) celebrate the courage of frontier settlers and the earnest life of the Great Plains’ immigrant farm families. As with many of Cather’s novels these involve independent, resourceful heroines. Alexandra of O Pioneers! succeeds as a determined, though lonesome farmer of the untamed land; and Ántonia prevails as a champion of humble valor.
In Shadows on the Rock (1931) Cather turned to the subject of French Canadians in seventeenth-century Québec, and her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), marked a return to the Virginia homeland of her childhood.
Willa Cather As Enigma
Cather, an intensely private person, submitted to a “self-imposed isolation” in the 1940s, and instructed that her letters be burned before her death. Cather’s intimate thoughts are mostly out of reach and much speculation surrounds Cather’s personal life because of her deep, enduring friendships with women.
At age 73, Willa Cather suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and died. She is buried in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.
Sources:
Brown, E.K. and Edel, Leon, Willa Cather: A Critical Biography, New York: Knopf, 1953
Cather, Willa, Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing As an Art, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [1988], c. 1949
O’Brien, Sharon, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987
Stout, Janis P., Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000
Woodress, James L., Willa Cather: A Literary Life, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987
Amy O'Loughlin - Amy O'Loughlin is an award-winning freelance writer with 13 years experience in newspaper, magazine, web-based magazine, and business ...
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