Willa Cather

Willa Cather in 1921.

Willa Cather (1873-1947) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author best known for her portrayals of frontier life on the American Great Plains in the late 19th century, exemplified by her novels O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918). In addition, she also wrote several novels expressing her lament concerning the demise of the frontier and the spread of a culture of convention and materialism in the 1920s. Her writings are not so much plot-driven as they are chronicles more concerned with the creation (or re-creation) of a social world.

Childhood

Cather was born on a farm in Virginia in 1873 and moved to Nebraska with her family when she was 10 years old. After farming for one year, the family moved to the small town of Red Cloud (near Nebraska's border with Kansas, where her father engaged in real estate work.

Education and early work experience

As a teenager inn 1890, Willa moved to Lincoln, where she attended a prep school prior to entering college at the University of Nebraska. She graduated from college in 1895, then moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she worked on a women's magazine (the Home Monthly). She then left that job to teach English and Latin in high school for several years.

First two books

At the age of 30 in 1903, she published a volume of poetry (April Twilights) and two years later, a collection of short stories (The Troll Garden).

McClure's Magazine (New York) and the biography of Mary Baker Eddy

After Cather was offered an editorial position at McClure's Magazine in 1906, she moved to New York City. Cather spent most of 1907 living in Boston, while working at McClure's, writing a series of exposés about the religious leader Mary Baker Eddy, although freelance journalist Georgine Milmine was credited as the author. A 1993 letter from Cather to her father, discovered in the Christian Science church archives in 1993, disclosed that Cather had (perhaps reluctantly) written articles 2 through 14 of the 14-part series. Milmine had performed copious amounts of research, but she had been unable to produce a manuscript independently. The book, The Life of Mary Baker Eddy and the History of Christian Science was an aggregation of fourteen exposé articles published 1907 to 1908 in McClure's, all attributed to Georgine Milmine as author. Cather's authorship of the book was not admitted in print until 1993, when Eddy biographer Gillian Gill found the letter in the archives of the Christian Science Church implicating Willa Cather as author of parts 2-14 of the article series. Cather appears not to have wanted any public association with the book, and the terms of her will still prevent the letter from being published (Gill was only able to paraphrase it). This early Eddy biography had great influence on subsequent Eddy biographies, despite its own source materials being mostly lost and despite serious questions surrounding its authorship and the intentions and objectivity of its authors.

First novels

It was while she was in New York that she published her first novels, including those for which she is best known today - O Pioneers! and My Antonia. Both of these novels detail the struggles of successful pioneer women to establish themselves on the Great Plains during frontier times and, in so doing, celebrate the entire panorama of European immigrant settlement of the Plains.

Middle phase

Sometime following this, her writing took a new direction. Several novels written during the 1920s mourned the rise of a new ethic of materialism and conventional life and the simultaneous loss of the pioneer spirit and the closing of the frontier. Among them were One of Ours (which won a Pulitzer Prize), A Lost Lady, and The Professor's House.

Last phase

The final phase of Cather's writing career was marked by novels of historical fiction celebrating the pioneers of even earlier eras: Death Comes for the Archbishop, set in the American Southwest, and Shadows on the Rock, set in 17th century Quebec.