Willa Cather
Best known for her depictions of pioneer life on the frontier, Willa Cather brought life to a previously-neglected part of American history. Born in Back Creek, Virginia on 7 December 1873, Cather moved in 1883 to Catherton, Nebraska, and then to Red Creek, Nebraska in 1884. The latter would become the focus of much of her writing, and her passion for the land is evident from her writing.
She referred to this land as both the “happiness and curse of my life”, and her Nebraska experiences, and the melding of the Old World immigrant culture with the New World of increasing technology is documented in seven of her books. She entered the University of Nebraska – Lincoln in September 1890 with the goal of studying medicine, but changed her mind after the publication of one of her essays in the Lincoln newspaper.
She wrote for the Nebraska State Journal and the Lincoln Courier while a student, and after graduating in 1895, she went to Pittsburgh, and then New York, where she became a managing editor for McClure’s Magazine, and published stories such as “Paul’s Case”.
Yet, the magazine business left her unfulfilled; she left journalism at thirty-seven at the advice of her friend Sarah Orne Jewett to pursue a full-time writing career. In 1912, she published Alexander’s Bridge, her first novel, and then O Pioneers!, a story about immigrant farmers and their quest to maintain their livelihood, in 1913.
The reviews for the latter were favorable, which encouraged Cather’s career. In each book, Cather dwelt on her past experiences, furthering this in The Song of the Lark, published in 1915, a story of the development of an opera singer, loosely based on Olive Fremstad, but mixed with the elements of her own childhood.
In My Antonia, published in 1918, centered around a Bohemian immigrant, Antonia, loosely modeled on her childhood friend, Annie Pavelka. Told through the eyes of a male narrator, Jim, whose love for the land parallels his love for his childhood friend, Antonia, My Antonia represents Cather’s own feelings when she left Nebraska. When Jim left Nebraska, he left behind his family, and his love for Antonia; Antonia, therefore, represents the West, while Jim’s memories of her and his family home stand for his lost youth.
Her greatest success came in the form of the novel One of Ours, published in 1922, which received a Pulitzer Prize in 1923. After the success of her 1927 novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Howells Medal, and she also received honorary degrees from Yale, Princeton, and Berkeley.
After receiving the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1944, she wrote, “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”
Bibliography
Gerber, Philip. Willa Cather. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.
Skaggs, Merrill M. After the World Broke in Two: The later novels of Willa Cather. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1990.
Jennifer Harrison-Konz - Jennifer Harrison-Konz holds a master's degree in American history, with a concentration in 19th-century women's history, and a bachelor's ...
