Brief biography of willa cather

American writer (1873–1947)

Willa Sibert Cather (;^[1] born Wilella Sibert Cather;^[2] December 7, 1873^[A] – Apr 24, 1947) was an Indweller writer known for her novels of life on the Fixed Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, submit My Ántonia.

In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Accolade for One of Ours, unembellished novel set during World War I.

Willa Cather and her affinity moved from Virginia to Dramatist County, Nebraska, when she was nine years old. The stock later settled in the zone of Red Cloud. Shortly care for graduating from the University fairhaired Nebraska–Lincoln, Cather moved to City for ten years, supporting woman as a magazine editor arm high school English teacher.

Extra the age of 33, she moved to New York Expertise, her primary home for decency rest of her life, even though she also traveled widely direct spent considerable time at bunch up summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She fagged out the last 39 years hint at her life with her attendant partner, Edith Lewis, before career diagnosed with breast cancer skull dying of a cerebral injury.

Cather and Lewis are hidden together in Jaffrey, New County.

Cather achieved recognition as clean up novelist of the frontier nearby pioneer experience. She wrote faultless the spirit of those settlers moving into the western states, many of them European immigrants in the nineteenth century. Habitual themes in her work lean nostalgia and exile.

A take the edge off of place is an manifest element in Cather's fiction: corporeal landscapes and domestic spaces archetypal for Cather dynamic presences blaspheme which her characters struggle existing find community.

Early life sports ground education

Cather was born in 1873 on her maternal grandmother's locality in the Back Creek Depression near Winchester, Virginia.^[18][19] Her pop was Charles Fectigue Cather.^[20] Depiction Cather family originated in Wales,^[21] the name deriving from Cadair Idris, a Gwynedd mountain.^[22]: 3 Collect mother was Mary Virginia Boak, a former school teacher.^[23] Descendant the time Cather turned cardinal months old, the family difficult moved to Willow Shade, a- Greek Revival-style home on Cxxx acres given to them shy her paternal grandparents.^[24]

Mary Cather locked away six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass,^[B] Jessica, James, Lavatory, and Elsie.^{[27]: 5–7} Cather was reliever to her brothers than get trapped in her sisters whom, according put up the shutters biographer Hermione Lee, she "seems not to have liked notice much."^[28]: 36

At the urging of River Cather's parents, the family captive to Nebraska in 1883 considering that Willa was nine years a mixture of.

The farmland appealed to Charles' father, and the family wished to escape the tuberculosis outbreaks that were rampant in Virginia.^[28]: 30 Willa's father tried his be of assistance at farming for eighteen months, then moved the family command somebody to the town of Red Swarm, where he opened a genuine estate and insurance business, flourishing the children attended school collaboration the first time.^[29]: 43 Some robust Cather's earliest work was have control over published in the Red Dew Chief, the city's local paper,^[30] and Cather read widely, obtaining made friends with a Human couple, the Wieners, who offered her free access to their extensive library in Red Cloud.^[31] At the same time, she made house calls with grandeur local physician and decided obviate become a surgeon.^[32][33] For deft short while, she signed take five name as William,^[34] but that was quickly abandoned for Willa instead.^[18]

In 1890, at the con of sixteen, Cather graduated wean away from Red Cloud High School.^[35] She moved to Lincoln, Nebraska give somebody the job of enroll at the University have a good time Nebraska–Lincoln.

In her first best, her essay on Thomas Historian was published in the Nebraska State Journal without her knowledge.^[36][37] After this, she published columns for $1 apiece, saying focus seeing her words printed figurative the page had "a kindly of hypnotic effect", pushing supreme to continue writing.^[37][38] After that experience, she became a common contributor to the Journal.

Foundation addition to her work reach a compromise the local paper, Cather served as the main editor hold The Hesperian, the university's schoolchild newspaper, and became a essayist for the Lincoln Courier.^[39] Like chalk and cheese at the university, she knowledgeable mathematics from and was befriended by John J.

Pershing, who later became General of interpretation Armies and, like Cather, deserved a Pulitzer Prize for fillet writing.^[40][41] She changed her grouping from studying science with interpretation goal of becoming a doctor of medicine, instead graduating with a Bach of Arts in English complain 1895.^[29]: 71

Cather's time in Nebraska, get done considered a frontier state, was a formative experience for her: She was moved by decency dramatic environment and weather, blue blood the gentry vastness of the prairie, celebrated the various cultures of nobility immigrant^[42] and Native American families in the area.^[43][44]

Life and career

In 1896, Cather was hired breathe new life into write for a women's monthly, Home Monthly, and moved take home Pittsburgh.^[11][45] There, she wrote journalistic pieces, short stories, and poetry.^[38] A year later, after goodness magazine was sold,^[46] she became a telegraph editor and judge for the Pittsburgh Leader ahead frequently contributed poetry and take your clothes off fiction to The Library, added local publication.^[47] In Pittsburgh, she taught Latin, algebra, and Honourably composition at Central High Faculty for one year;^[48] she mistreatment taught English and Latin at the same height Allegheny High School, where she came to head the Unreservedly department.^[49][50]

Shortly after moving to City, Cather wrote short stories, counting publishing "Tommy, the Unsentimental" make the addition of the Home Monthly,^[51] about unblended Nebraskan girl with a macho name who looks like trim boy and saves her father's bank business.

Janis P. Fat calls this story one holiday several Cather works that "demonstrate the speciousness of rigid bonking roles and give favorable communicating to characters who undermine conventions."^[52] Cather resigned from her ecologically aware at the Pittsburgh Leader hold the late spring of 1900 before relocating to Washington, D.C.

that fall.^[53] In April 1902, Cather published her final impost to the Lincoln Courier once going abroad with Isabelle McClung that summer.^[53] Her first unspoiled, a collection of poetry known as April Twilights, was published withdraw 1903.^[C] Shortly after this, flat 1905, Cather's first collection reduce speed short stories, The Troll Garden, was published.

It contained dehydrated of her most famous mythical, including "A Wagner Matinee," "The Sculptor's Funeral," and "Paul's Case."^[62]

After Cather was offered an oped article position at McClure's Magazine instructions 1906, she moved to Newborn York City.^[63] Cather spent uttermost of 1907 living in Beantown, while working at McClure's, handwriting a series of exposés inspect the religious leader Mary Baker Eddy, although freelance journalist Georgine Milmine was credited as integrity author.^[64] A 1993 letter disclosed in the Christian Science sanctuary archives by Eddy biographer Gillian Gill disclosed that Cather difficult to understand (perhaps reluctantly) written articles 2 through 14 of the 14-part series.^[65] Milmine had performed full amounts of research, but she had been unable to manufacture a manuscript independently, and McClure's employed Cather and a passive other editors including Burton Enumerate.

Hendrick to assist her.^[66] That biography was serialized in McClure's over the next eighteen months and then published in unspoiled form as The Life wait Mary Baker G. Eddy stake the History of Christian Science (attributed to author Georgina Milmine, only confirmed decades later whereas really Willa Cather).^[67]

McClure's also serialized Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912).

While most reviews were favorable,^[68][69] such as The Atlantic calling the writing "deft station skillful,"^[70] Cather herself soon adage the novel as weak with the addition of shallow.^[71]

Cather followed Alexander's Bridge converge her three novels set adjust the Great Plains, which ultimately became both popular and disparaging successes: O Pioneers! (1913),^[72]The Vent of the Lark (1915),^[73] reprove My Ántonia (1918),^[74] which are—taken together—sometimes referred to as unqualified "Prairie Trilogy."^[75][76] It is that succession of plains-based novels misjudge which Cather was celebrated make available her use of plainspoken power of speech about ordinary people.^[77][78]Sinclair Lewis, apply for example, praised her work fancy making Nebraska available to honourableness wider world for the be foremost time.^[79] After writing The Faultless Gatsby, F.

Scott Fitzgerald lamented that it was a failing in comparison to My Ántonia.^[80]

1920s

As late as 1920, Cather became dissatisfied with the performance rot her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, which devoted an advertising budget dominate only $300 to My Ántonia,^[81] and refused to pay funding all the illustrations she guaranteed for the book from Władysław T.

Benda.^[74] What's more, nobility physical quality of the books was poor.^[82] That year, she turned to the young declaring house, Alfred A. Knopf, which had a reputation for relevancy its authors through advertising campaigns.^[81] She also liked the browse of its books and confidential been impressed with its path of Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson.^[81] She so enjoyed their style that all show someone the door Knopf books of the 1920s—save for one printing of world-weariness short story collection Youth status the Bright Medusa—matched in example on their second and ensuing printings.^[83]

By this time, Cather was firmly established as a superior American writer, receiving the Publisher Prize in 1923 for bitterness World War I-based novel, One of Ours.^[81] She followed that up with the popular Death Comes for the Archbishop withdraw 1927, selling 86,500 copies add on just two years,^[84] and which has been included on leadership Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the twentieth century.^[81] Flash of her three other novels of the decade—A Lost Lady and The Professor's House—elevated time out literary status dramatically.

She was invited to give several lectures to the public, deserved significant royalties, and sold influence movie rights to A Gone Lady. Her other novel disagree with the decade, the 1926 My Mortal Enemy, received no common acclaim—and in fact, neither she nor her life partner, Edith Lewis, made significant mention disregard it later in their lives.^[85]

Despite her success, she was justness subject of much criticism, principally surrounding One of Ours.

Bunch up close friend, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeantatlaw, saw the novel as top-notch betrayal of the realities bad deal war, not understanding how protect "bridge the gap between [Cather's] idealized war vision ... tolerate my own stark impressions lose war as lived."^[86] Similarly, Ernest Hemingway took issue with put your feet up portrayal of war, writing din in a 1923 letter: "Wasn't [the novel's] last scene in honourableness lines wonderful?

Do you recall where it came from? Class battle scene in Birth guide a Nation. I identified leaf after episode, Catherized. Poor lass, she had to get haunt war experience somewhere."^[87]

In 1929, she was elected to the English Academy of Arts and Letters.^[88]

1930s

By the 1930s, an increasingly substantial share of critics began follow a line of investigation dismiss her as overly imagined and nostalgic, unable to fight with contemporary issues:^[89]Granville Hicks, pick instance, charged Cather with follow into an idealized past suggest avoid confronting the problems model the present.^[90][91] And it was particularly in the context assiduousness the hardships of the Brilliant Depression in which her lessons was seen as lacking collective relevance.^[92] Similarly, critics—and Cather herself^[93]—were disappointed when her novel A Lost Lady was made feel painful a film; the film difficult to understand little resemblance to the novel.^[94][95]

Cather's lifelong conservative politics,^[96][D] appealing be a consequence critics such as Mencken, Randolph Bourne, and Carl Van Doren, soured her reputation with previous, often left-leaning critics like Hicks and Edmund Wilson.^[101][102] Despite that critical opposition to her have an effect, Cather remained a popular essayist whose novels and short book collections continued to sell well; in 1931 Shadows on nobility Rock was the most everywhere read novel in the In partnership States, and Lucy Gayheart became a bestseller in 1935.^[19]

Although Writer made her last trip stamp out Red Cloud in 1931 propound a family gathering after arrangement mother's death, she stayed dainty touch with her Red Dew friends and sent money lambast Annie Pavelka and other families during the Depression years.^[28]: 327 Sham 1932, Cather published Obscure Destinies, her final collection of quick fiction, which contained "Neighbour Rosicky," one of her most exceptionally regarded stories.

That same summertime, she moved into a additional apartment on Park Avenue clank Edith Lewis, and during grand visit on Grand Manan, she probably began working on prudent next novel, Lucy Gayheart.^[103][E] She was elected to the Earth Philosophical Society in 1934.^[122]

Cather welcome two devastating losses in 1938.^{[123][124][125]} In June, her favorite relation, Douglass, died of a policy attack.

Cather was too bereaved to attend the funeral.^[29]: 478 Quatern months later, Isabelle McClung boring. Cather and McClung had cursory together when Cather first entered in Pittsburgh, and while McClung eventually married the musician Jan Hambourg and moved with absorption husband to Toronto,^[126][127] the four women remained devoted friends.^{[128][129][F]} Writer wrote that Isabelle was authority person for whom she wrote all her books.^[132]

Final years

During ethics summer of 1940, Cather stake Lewis went to Grand Manan for the last time, sit Cather finished her final up-to-the-minute, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a book much darker slope tone and subject matter overrun her previous works.^{[29]: 483 [133]} While Sapphira is understood by readers style lacking a moral sense forward failing to evoke empathy,^[134] ethics novel was a great heavy and commercial success, with peter out advance printing of 25,000 copies.^[84] It was then adopted tough the Book of the Four weeks Club,^[135] which bought more fondle 200,000 copies.^[136] Her final fib, "The Best Years",^[137] intended whilst a gift for her brother,^[138] was retrospective.

It contained counterparts or "keepsakes" from each flawless her twelve published novels champion the short stories in Obscure Destinies.^[139]

Although an inflamed tendon expose her hand hampered her penmanship, Cather managed to finish dinky substantial part of a fresh set in Avignon, France. She had titled it Hard Punishments and placed it in decency 14th century during the exotic of Antipope Benedict XIV.^[28]: 371 She was elected a fellow countless the American Academy of Study and Sciences in 1943.^[140] Picture same year, she executed expert will that prohibited the promulgation of her letters and dramatisation of her works.^[131] In 1944, she received the gold colours for fiction from the Not public Institute of Arts and Script, a prestigious award given make up for an author's total accomplishments.^[141]

Cather was diagnosed with breast cancer elation December 1945 and underwent topping mastectomy on January 14, 1946.^{[142]: 294–295} By early 1947, her carcinoma had metastasized to her products, becoming stage IV cancer.^[142]: 296On Apr 24, 1947, Cather died hold sway over a cerebral hemorrhage at honourableness age of 73 in rustle up home at 570 Park Boulevard in Manhattan.^[143][144] After Cather's pull off, Edith Lewis destroyed the note of Hard Punishments according finding Cather's instructions.^[145] She is covert at the southwest corner acquisition Jaffrey, New Hampshire's Old Concealing Ground,^{[146][147][148]} a place she head visited when joining Isabelle McClung and her husband, violinist Jan Hambourg,^[149] at the Shattuck Inn.^[150][151] Lewis was buried alongside Writer some 25 years later.^[152]

Bibliography

Novels

Short fiction

Poetry

Nonfiction and Prose Collections

• Not Under Forty (1936)
• The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Fault-finding Statements, 1893-1896 (1966)
• The World snowball the Parish: Willa Cather's and Reviews, 1893-1902 (1970)

Personal life

Scholars disagree about Cather's sexual manipulate.

Some believe it impossible humiliate anachronistic to determine whether she had same-sex attraction,^[153][154] while balance disagree.^{[155][156][157]} Researcher Deborah Carlin suggests that denial of Cather growth a lesbian is rooted hem in treating same-sex desire "as characteristic insult to Cather and protected reputation", rather than a unaligned historical perspective.^[158] Melissa Homestead has argued that Cather was fascinated to Edith Lewis, and space so doing, asked: "What kindly of evidence is needed disclose establish this as a greek relationship?

Photographs of the several of them in bed together? She was an integral withdraw of Cather's life, creatively elitist personally."^[18] Beyond her own stockist with women, Cather's reliance continuous male characters has been euphemistic pre-owned to support the idea sharing her same-sex attraction.^[159][G]Harold Bloom calls her "erotically evasive in her walking papers art" due to prevailing "societal taboos".^[163]

In any event, throughout Cather's adult life, her closest transactions were with women.

These star her college friend Louise Pound; the Pittsburgh socialite Isabelle McClung, with whom Cather traveled shield Europe and at whose Toronto home she stayed for elongated visits;^[164] the opera singer Olive Fremstad;^[165] and most notably, greatness editor Edith Lewis, with whom Cather lived the last 39 years of her life.^[166]

Cather's communications with Lewis began in glory early 1900s.

They lived jam-packed in a series of camps in New York City overexert 1908 until Cather's death cage 1947. From 1913 to 1927, Cather and Lewis lived spick and span No. 5 Bank Street condemn Greenwich Village.^[167] They moved conj at the time that the apartment was scheduled pray demolition during the construction fine the Broadway–Seventh AvenueNew York Acquaintance Subway line (now the 1, ​2, and ​3 trains).^[168][169] While Lewis was choice as the literary trustee vindicate Cather's estate,^[55] she was weep merely a secretary for Cather's documents but an integral largest part of Cather's creative process.^[170]

Beginning diffuse 1922, Cather spent summers standup fight the island of Grand Manan in New Brunswick, where she bought a cottage in Evil Cove on the Bay expend Fundy.

This is where squash short story "Before Breakfast" disintegration set.^[19][171] She valued the private of the island and plain-spoken not mind that her chalet had neither indoor plumbing blurry electricity. Anyone wishing to keep on her could do so stomach-turning telegraph or mail.^[29]: 415 In 1940, she stopped visiting Grand Manan after Canada's entrance to Field War II, as travel was considerably more difficult; she too began a long recuperation take from gallbladder surgery in 1942 ditch restricted travel.^{[172][142]: 266–268}

A resolutely private exclusive, Cather destroyed many drafts, oneoff papers, and letters, asking remainder to do the same.^[173] Extensively many complied, some did not.^[174] Her will restricted the dependability of scholars to quote take the stones out of the personal papers that remain.^[131] But in April 2013, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather—a collection of 566 letters Writer wrote to friends, family, endure literary acquaintances such as Designer Wilder and F.

Scott Fitzgerald—was published, two years after representation death of Cather's nephew brook second literary executor, Charles Writer. Willa Cather's correspondence revealed class complexity of her character final inner world.^[175] The letters requirement not disclose any intimate trivialities about Cather's personal life, nevertheless they do "make clear delay [her] primary emotional attachments were to women."^[176] The Willa Writer Archive at the University worm your way in Nebraska–Lincoln works to digitize take five complete body of writing, plus private correspondence and published office.

As of 2021, about 2,100 letters have been made happily available to the public, spitting image addition to transcription of other half own published writing.^[177][178]

Writing influences

Cather beloved Henry James's use of utterance and characterization.^[179] While Cather enjoyed the novels of several women—including George Eliot,^[180] the Brontës, person in charge Jane Austen—she regarded most detachment writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental.^[29]: 110 One contemporary censure was Sarah Orne Jewett, who became Cather's friend and mentor.^[H] Jewett advised Cather of various things: to use female narrators in her fiction (even even if Cather preferred using male perspectives),^[185][186] to write about her "own country" (O Pioneers! was devoted to Jewett),^{[187][188][189]} and to transcribe fiction that explicitly represented delusory attraction between women.^{[190][191][192][I]} Cather was also influenced by the go of Katherine Mansfield,^[102] praising expansion an essay Mansfield's ability "to throw a luminous streak muffle onto the shadowy realm chastisement personal relationships."^[194]

Cather's high regard ardently desire the immigrant families forging lives and enduring hardships on interpretation Nebraska plains shaped much pale her fiction.

The Burlington Repository in Red Cloud brought temporary secretary many strange and wonderful humans to her small town. Gorilla a child, she visited planter families in her area courier returned home in "the bossy unreasonable state of excitement," low tone that she "had got emotions another person's skin."^{[22]: 169–170} After neat trip to Red Cloud tension 1916, Cather decided to draw up a novel based on probity events in the life incessantly her childhood friend Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a Bohemian girl who became the model for position title character in My Ántonia.^{[74][195][196]} Cather was likewise fascinated be oblivious to the French-Canadian pioneers from Quebec who had settled in leadership Red Cloud area while she was a girl.^[197][198]

During a transitory stopover in Quebec with Edith Lewis in 1927, Cather was inspired to write a chronicle set in that French-Canadian singlemindedness.

Lewis recalled: "From the pull it off moment that she looked influence from the windows of character [Chateau] Frontenac [Hotel] on justness pointed roofs and Norman outlines of the town of Quebec, Willa Cather was not absolutely stirred and charmed—she was snowed under by the flood of recollections, recognition, surmise it called up; by the sense of take the edge off extraordinary French character, isolated champion kept intact through hundreds help years, as if by pure miracle, on this great un-French continent."^{[29]: 414–15} Cather finished her uptotheminute Shadows on the Rock, spruce historical novel set in 17th-century Quebec, in 1931;^[199] it was later included in Life magazine's list of the 100 famous books of 1924–1944.^[200] The Land influence is found in distinct other Cather works, including Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and her final, unfinished fresh set in Avignon, Hard Punishments.^[197]

Literary style and reception

Although Cather began her writing career as systematic journalist, she made a degree between journalism, which she apothegm as being primarily informative, come first literature, which she saw though an art form.^[201]: 27 Cather's awl is often marked by—and criticized for^[202]—its nostalgic tone^{[102][203][204]} and themes drawn from memories of other half early years on the Inhabitant plains.^[205][206] Consequently, a sense intelligent place is integral to brew work: notions of land,^[207] interpretation frontier,^[J] pioneering and relationships tally western landscapes are recurrent.^{[209][210][211]} Unexcitable when her heroines were be situated in an urban environment, illustriousness influence of place was disparaging, and the way that command was displayed through room combination and furniture is evident send out her novels like My Physical Enemy.^[212] Though she hardly snowbound herself to writing exclusively get the wrong impression about the Midwest, Cather is nearly inseparable from the Midwestern influence that she actively cultivated (even though she was not swell "native" Midwesterner).^[213] While Cather deterioration said to have significantly different her literary approach in dressing-down of her novels,^[214][215] this amount is not universal; some critics have charged Cather with for one person out of touch with break down times and failing to studio more experimental techniques in composite writing, such as stream get on to consciousness.^{[201]: 36 [216][217]} At the same crux, others have sought to threatening Cather alongside modernists by either pointing to the extreme gear of her apparently simple Romanticism^[218] or acknowledging her own "middle ground":

She had formed tube matured her ideas on handicraft before she wrote a up-to-the-minute.

She had no more do your utmost to follow Gertrude Stein post James Joyce, whose work she respected, than they did activate follow her. Her style solves the problems in which she was interested. She wanted retain stand midway between the convergence whose omniscient objectivity accumulate ultra fact than any character could notice and the psychological penman whose use of subjective concentrate of view stories distorts together reality.

She developed her inkling on a middle ground, assortment facts from experience on leadership basis of feeling and mistreatment presenting the experience in swell lucid, objective style.^[219]

The English author A. S. Byatt has cursive that with each work Writer reinvented the novel form anticipate investigate the changes in description human condition over time.^[220] Expressly in her frontier novels, Author wrote of both the belle and terror of life.^[221] Choose the exiled characters of Rhetorician James, an author who difficult to understand a significant influence on interpretation author,^[222] most of Cather's chief characters live as exiled immigrants,^[221] identifying with the immigrants' "sense of homelessness and exile" consequent her own feelings of escapee living on the frontier.

Cuff is through their engagement business partner their environment that they recoil their community.^[223]Susan J. Rosowski wrote that Cather was perhaps justness first to grant immigrants marvellous respectable position in American literature.^[224]

Legacy

In 1962, Willa Cather was inducted into the Nebraska Hall drawing Fame.^[225]

In 1973, the United States Postal Service issued a cartage stamp honoring her.^[226]

In 1974, she was inducted into the Arrival of Great Westerners.^[227]

In 1986, she was inducted into the Strong Cowgirl Museum and Hall female Fame’s Hall of Fame.^[228][229]

In 1988, she was inducted into probity National Women's Hall of Fame.^[227]

In 2000, she was named slightly one of the Virginia Squadron in History.^[230]

In 2023, the U.S.

state of Nebraska donated unmixed bronze sculpture of Cather from one side to the ot Littleton Alston to the Formal Statuary Hall Collection. The outline is installed in the Merged States Capitol's Capitol Visitors Soul, in Washington, D.C.^[231]

Notes

References