WILLA CATHER WROTE WHAT SHE LIVED

Sara Orne Jewett, a local colorist from Maine, once suggested that Willa Cather write from her own background. Cather followed that advice and became famous for her stories of the American frontier; especially those about heroic women who struggled to tame the prairies of Nebraska and the Southwest.

Cather's first novel was published in 1912 and was called Alexander's Bridge. In 1913 came O Pioneers! which took its title from a poem by Walt Whitman. My Antonia, published in 1918, is probably her best known work, and features the hardy, sensitive women who led courageous, simple lives of endurance in the harshly beautiful wilderness. These immigrants would become the mothers of a new race of Americans, and the book spans the few generations that saw the prairie transformed into modern farmland and cities.

In 1927, Willa Cather wrote what is considered her best work, Death Comes for the Archbishop, about missionary priests in New Mexico. In 1923, she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, the story of an American farmer who dies in battle in World War I.

Like the narrator in My Antonia, Willa Cather was born in Virginia, the oldest child in an Irish family, and moved to Ne

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He is not respected as he was in his homeland, and his skills do not help him in farming.

The author's preference for the openhearted farmers and sensitive women over the town snobs is similar to Sinclair Lewis's judgments in Main Street. Not only is farming the land hard on these women, but marriage and small town society are too.

Willa Cather traveled to Europe and visited the original homes of her immigrant characters.

Like her protagonist, Cather grew up among European immigrants and enjoyed the simple pleasures of a rural childhood, like giving plays.

Again, like her narrator in My Antonia, Willa Cather graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1895 and went east.

She spent her last years in New York and New England, where she became a very private person. Willa Cather had an interest in medicine and a lifelong love of music and theater.

When she died in 1947, she was buried in New Hampshire.

Cather never married, and according to one source, she sometimes wore men's clothes and passed as a male doctor, in order to avoid the prejudice against women that was common in society in those days. To the end of her life, she was devoted to the arts and books.

In 1912, she first visited the Southwest, where she "discovered herself" and was especially impressed with the Anasazi cliff dwellings. But in America, the hired girls can decide to leave or stay and build new lives. html

"Cather" Twentieth-Century Criticism

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