The American author Willa Sibert Cather is distinguished for her strong and sensitive evocations of prairie life in the twilight years of the midwestern frontier. Her poetic sensibility was in sharp contrast to the naturalistic and Freudian-influenced literary movements of her time.
Background
Willa Cather was born on December 7, 1873 in Winchester, Virginia, United States, the daughter of Charles Fectigue Cather and Mary Virginia Boak. When Willa was 9, the family moved to Nebraska, where her father had bought a farm. Her immediate response to the stark grandeur of the prairie and her involvement in the life of the Bohemian and Scandinavian immigrants provided her with both the material and an unadorned manner of expression for her novels.
Education
Although Cather was educated largely by her mother, her knowledge of English literature and Latin was sufficient for her to do excellent work at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, graduating in 1894. Initially, she planned to study science and medicine, but during an initial year of preparatory studies, Cather wrote an English essay on Thomas Carlyle that her professor submitted to the Lincoln newspaper for publication.
Since then her aspirations changed; she would become a writer. Willa became managing editor of the school newspaper, the author of short stories, and a theater critic and columnist for the Nebraska State Journal as well as for the Lincoln Courier. While she was producing four columns per week, she was still a full-time student.
Career
In 1896, Willa accepted a position in Pittsburgh as writer and managing editor for Home Monthly, a women’s magazine. She continued to write for the Journal and the Pittsburgh Leader, mostly as a theatre critic while running Home Monthly. After a few years of journalism, Willa stepped into the role of teacher. From 1901 to 1906, she taught English, Latin, and, in one case, algebra at nearby high schools.
In 1903 Cather published a collection of poems, April Twilights, and in 1905 a collection of short stories, The Troll Garden, neither of which indicated her considerable talent. In 1906, Willa was invited to join the staff of McClure’s Magazine in New York City. She ghostwrote a notable biography of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, which was credited to researcher Georgine Milmine and published in several installments around 1907. Her position as managing editor earned her prestige and the admiration of McClure himself, but it also meant that she had significantly less time to work on her own writing. On the advice of her mentor Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa left the magazine business in 1911 to focus on fiction.
Her first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912), the story of an engineer's love for two women, lacked emotional involvement. In her poignant story of the prairie, O Pioneers! (1913), Cather at last discovered her subject matter. This tale of Alexandra Bergson, daughter of Swedish settlers, whose devotion to the land and to her tragically fated younger brother precludes her own chance for happiness, is a major novel and an important source for Cather's subsequent work.
In Song of the Lark (1915) she presents the story of a young woman's attempt at artistic accomplishment in the constricting environment of small-town life. My Antonia (1918), generally considered her finest novel, is based on a successful city lawyer's reflections on his prairie boyhood and his love for Antonia Shimerda, a warm, vibrant Bohemian girl.
Cather's next novel, One of Ours (1922), about a man who goes to war in order to escape his midwestern farm environment, won the Pulitzer Prize. A Lost Lady (1923) depicts the conflict of a cultivated and sensitive young woman with the crass materialism of the post-pioneer period, and The Professor's House (1925) is a study of the problems of youth and middle age. These three novels differ from Cather's earlier studies of prairie life in that the midwestern atmosphere is used as a force in opposition to the artistic aspiration and intellectual development of the gifted inhabitants.
With the passing of the frontier and its ugly transformation into "Gopher Prairie," Cather permanently left the Midwest, both literally and as a thematic vehicle for her novels. She lived intermittently in New York and Europe until the late 1920s. Then she discovered the Southwest desert, which came to serve as an emotional substitute for the prairie.
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), which describes the dedicated missionaries in Mexico during the 1850s, and Shadows on the Rock (1931), a vivid re-creation of French-Catholic life in 17th-century Quebec, represent Cather's interest in Roman Catholicism and her attempt to find a historical metaphor for the qualities of heroism and endurance that she had observed in actuality. In her last years Cather devoted herself to literary criticism. Not under Forty (1936) contains an eloquent expression of her philosophy of writing.
Religion
Cather was born into a Baptist family, she began attending Episcopal services in 1906, and she joined the Episcopal Church in 1922.
Views
Willa Cather's devotion to the land and her respect for those rooted to it imbue her work with a mystical quality. Man and nature are viewed as dual protagonists in a somber cosmic drama. Despite her love for the prairie, she did not permit sentimentally and nostalgia to cloud the clarity of her vision. She presented the intellectual stagnation, moral callousness, and small-minded bigotry that existed side by side with the heroism of frontier life.
Quotations:
"There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before."
"That is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great."
"She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends."
"Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness."
"I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!"
"Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere."
"One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days..."
"To fulfill the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that."
"I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep."
Personality
Throughout her life, Willa Cather made friendships in particular with women - Louise Pound, Isabelle McClung, Olive Fremstad, Yaltah Menuhin and Edith Lewis. With the latter, Willa lived the last 39 years of her life - from 1908 until 1947. After Cather’s death, Lewis served as the executor of Cather’s estate and published a memoir about her partner called Willa Cather Living, a book she called a “portrait of a great artist” drawn from her memories of their long relationship. After she died in 1972, Lewis’s family took her body to Jaffrey and buried it at Cather’s side. Thus Cather's sexual identity still remains a question.
Quotes from others about the person
"Miss Cather's novels portray the results of the pioneer's defeat, both in the thwarted pettiness to which he is condemned by material failure and in the callous insensitivity of his material success." - Lionel Trilling
"Willa Cather’s eyes were like a direct communication of her spirit. The whole of herself was in her look, in that transparently clear, level, unshrinking gaze that seemed to know everything there was to be known about both herself and you." - Edith Lewis