American Literature/20th Century/Willa Cather

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[edit] Life

Wilella Sibert "Willa" Cather was born about 1876 on a farm in Virgina, but her family eventually moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska. Baby baby baby She attended the University of Nebraska and contributed writings to the Nebraska State Journal. She worked as an English teacher in Pittsburgh from 1901 to 1906 and then got a job at McClure's Magazine in New York City. Her first novel, Alexander's Bridge was published in serial form in that magazine. In 1908 Cather was named managing editor of McClure's. She worked at McClure's until 1912, at which time she devoted herself to writing. Cather died in 1947 in New York.

[edit] Style and Themes

The early writing of Willa Cather was influenced by Henry James until another author, Sarah Orne Jewett urged her to develop her own style and to write about her home in Nebraska. Some critics, such as H. L. Mencken praised her for writing about ordinary people in ordinary language. She is also known for the clarity of her writing.

She presents the relationships between her characters subtly, as in this passage from one of her novels:

People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know. We were... A man and woman draw apart from that long embrace, and see what they have done to each other... In age we lose everything; even the power to love. --My Mortal Enemy, Part II, Ch. 4

The themes of her novels are often related to the adventure of immigrating to a new continent and the rise of civilizations, as in the following excerpts:

He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the buffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story. This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed, — these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces, — and this would always be his. --A Lost Lady, Part II, Ch. 9

There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. --My Antonia, Book I, Ch. 1

A strong sense of place pervades Cather's work, for the settings are integral to the themes, as the following quotations demonstrate:

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, — and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky! --Death Comes to the Archbishop, Book VII, Ch. 4

She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring. --O, Pioneers!, Part I, Ch. 5

[edit] Awards and Honors

Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1923 for her novel One of Ours, which was inspired by her brother's letters from the field during World War I.
She won the Howells Medal from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1930 for Death Comes for the Archbishop.
She received honorary degrees from the University of Nebraska, the University of Michigan, the University of California, Columbia University, Yale University, Princeton, and Creighton.
She is a member of the Nebraska Hall of Fame.

[edit] Works

Nonfiction books
- The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1909) by co-authored with Georgine Milmine (reprinted U of Nebraska Press, 1993)
- On Writing (1949) (reprint U of Nebraska Press, 1988)

Books of poetry
- April Twilights (1903)

Collections of short stories
- The Troll Garden (1905)

Selected Novels
- Alexander's Bridge (1912)
- O Pioneers! (1913)
- The Song of the Lark (1915)
- My Ántonia (1918)
- One of Ours (1922)
- A Lost Lady (1923)
- Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
- Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940)

[edit] External Links

The Willa Cather Archive at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln contains many educational resources including texts, a biography, a large image gallery, multimedia presentations, and critical essays.

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