From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Willa Siebert Cather (December
7, 1873[1]–
April 24, 1947) was an American author
who grew up in Nebraska.
She is best known for her depictions of frontier life on the
Great Plains in novels such as O
Pioneers!,My
Ántonia, and The
Song of the Lark.
Biography
Born Wilella Siebert Cather in 1873 on a small farm in the Back
Creek valley near
Winchester, Virginia. Her father was Charles Fectigue Cather (d. 1928),
whose family had lived on land in the valley for six generations. Her mother
was Mary Virginia Boak (d. 1931). Mary had six more children after Willa:
Roscoe, Douglass, Jessica, James, John, and Elsie.[2] In
1883, Cather moved with her family to Catherton in Webster
County, Nebraska. The following year the family relocated to Red
Cloud, the county seat. Cather spent the rest of her childhood in the town
which she later made famous by her writing career. When Willa Cather insisted
on attending college, her family borrowed money for her to attend the University
of Nebraska.
While in college, Cather became a regular contributor to the Nebraska
State Journal. Later she moved to Pittsburgh.
After receiving a job offer from McClure's
Magazine, she moved to New York City for her career. McClure's
Magazine serialized her first
novel,
Alexander's Bridge, a work heavily influenced by her admiration for
the style of Henry
James.
Cather was born into a Baptist family,
but in 1922 joined the Episcopal
Church. After moving to New York, she began to attend Sunday services in
the Episcopal Church as early as 1906.[3]
Cather died on April 24, 1947 in New
York City of a cerebral
hemorrhage and was buried in Jaffrey,
New Hampshire.[4][5]
Writing
career
Cather moved to join the editorial staff of McClure's and
in 1908 was promoted to managing editor. As a journalist, she co-authored,
alongside Georgina M. Wells, a critical biography of Mary
Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian
Science. It was serialized in McClure's in
1907-8 and published the next year as a book. Christian Scientists were
outraged and tried to buy up every copy. The work was reprinted by the
University of Nebraska Press in 1993. In 1942 Cather met a variety of authors
in New York. Sarah
Orne Jewett advised her to rely
less on the influence of Henry James and more on her own experiences in
Nebraska. For her novels, Cather returned to the prairie for inspiration and
also drew on her experiences in France. These works became both popular and
critical successes.
In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize for One
of Ours, published in 1922. This work had been inspired by reading her
cousin G.P.
Cather's wartime letters home to his mother. He was the first officer from
Nebraska killed in World
War I. Those letters are now held in the George Cather Ray Collection at
the University
of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries.
Cather was celebrated by critics like H.L.
Mencken for writing in
plainspoken language about ordinary people. When novelist Sinclair
Lewis won the Nobel
Prize in Literature, he paid homage to her by saying that Cather should
have won the honor.
Later critics tended to favor more experimental authors. In times of political
activism some agreed with Cather, a political conservative,
for writing about conditions of ordinary people, rather than working to change
them.