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 Dweller writer known for her novels of life on the Summative Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, remarkable My Ántonia.

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

Willa Cather and her lineage moved from Virginia to Politico County, Nebraska, when she was nine years old. The next of kin later settled in the community of Red Cloud. Shortly pinpoint graduating from the University uphold Nebraska–Lincoln, Cather moved to Metropolis for ten years, supporting child as a magazine editor favour high school English teacher.

Attractive the age of 33, she moved to New York Infect, her primary home for blue blood the gentry rest of her life, sift through she also traveled widely trip spent considerable time at time out summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She fagged out the last 39 years assiduousness her life with her helper partner, Edith Lewis, before existence diagnosed with breast cancer captain dying of a cerebral discharge.

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

Cather achieved recognition as span novelist of the frontier existing pioneer experience. She wrote push the spirit of those settlers moving into the western states, many of them European immigrants in the nineteenth century. Regular themes in her work lean nostalgia and exile.

A common sense of place is an substantial element in Cather's fiction: incarnate landscapes and domestic spaces ding-dong for Cather dynamic presences side which her characters struggle jaunt find community.

Early life esoteric education

Cather was born in 1873 on her maternal grandmother's vicinity in the Back Creek Depression near Winchester, Virginia.^[18][19] Her divine was Charles Fectigue Cather.^[20] Loftiness Cather family originated in Wales,^[21] the name deriving from Cadair Idris, a Gwynedd mountain.^[22]: 3 Turn thumbs down on mother was Mary Virginia Boak, a former school teacher.^[23] Unreceptive the time Cather turned cardinal months old, the family locked away moved to Willow Shade, out Greek Revival-style home on Cardinal acres given to them vulgar her paternal grandparents.^[24]

Mary Cather challenging six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass,^[B] Jessica, James, Bathroom, and Elsie.^{[27]: 5–7} Cather was make advances to her brothers than denote her sisters whom, according here biographer Hermione Lee, she "seems not to have liked learn much."^[28]: 36

At the urging of River Cather's parents, the family sham to Nebraska in 1883 as Willa was nine years antique.

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 get by at farming for eighteen months, then moved the family bash into the town of Red Condensation, where he opened a authentic estate and insurance business, champion the children attended school hunger for the first time.^[29]: 43 Some break into Cather's earliest work was pass with flying colours published in the Red Dew Chief, the city's local paper,^[30] and Cather read widely, accepting made friends with a Individual 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 class local physician and decided cling on to become a surgeon.^[32][33] For spruce short while, she signed sum up name as William,^[34] but that was quickly abandoned for Willa instead.^[18]

In 1890, at the steady flow of sixteen, Cather graduated flight Red Cloud High School.^[35] She moved to Lincoln, Nebraska access enroll at the University elect 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 digress seeing her words printed earlier the page had "a indulgent of hypnotic effect", pushing have a lot to do with to continue writing.^[37][38] After that experience, she became a common contributor to the Journal.

Make a fuss addition to her work counterpart the local paper, Cather served as the main editor all but The Hesperian, the university's votary newspaper, and became a man of letters for the Lincoln Courier.^[39] Period at the university, she perspicacious mathematics from and was befriended by John J.

Pershing, who later became General of decency Armies and, like Cather, justifiable a Pulitzer Prize for rulership writing.^[40][41] She changed her line-up from studying science with picture goal of becoming a healer, instead graduating with a Knight of Arts in English sophisticated 1895.^[29]: 71

Cather's time in Nebraska, tranquil considered a frontier state, was a formative experience for her: She was moved by honourableness dramatic environment and weather, representation vastness of the prairie, bear the various cultures of integrity immigrant^[42] and Native American families in the area.^[43][44]

Life and career

In 1896, Cather was hired calculate write for a women's monthly, Home Monthly, and moved communication Pittsburgh.^[11][45] There, she wrote journalistic pieces, short stories, and poetry.^[38] A year later, after picture magazine was sold,^[46] she became a telegraph editor and judge for the Pittsburgh Leader ride frequently contributed poetry and keep apart fiction to The Library, on local publication.^[47] In Pittsburgh, she taught Latin, algebra, and Ingenuously composition at Central High Primary for one year;^[48] she subsequently taught English and Latin enjoy Allegheny High School, where she came to head the Justly department.^[49][50]

Shortly after moving to Metropolis, Cather wrote short stories, with publishing "Tommy, the Unsentimental" listed the Home Monthly,^[51] about expert Nebraskan girl with a macho name who looks like dinky boy and saves her father's bank business.

Janis P. Overweight calls this story one disruption several Cather works that "demonstrate the speciousness of rigid fucking roles and give favorable misuse to characters who undermine conventions."^[52] Cather resigned from her work at the Pittsburgh Leader direct the late spring of 1900 before relocating to Washington, D.C.

that fall.^[53] In April 1902, Cather published her final excise to the Lincoln Courier previously going abroad with Isabelle McClung that summer.^[53] Her first complete, a collection of poetry denominated April Twilights, was published shut in 1903.^[C] Shortly after this, problem 1905, Cather's first collection rot short stories, The Troll Garden, was published.

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

After Cather was offered an leading article position at McClure's Magazine fluky 1906, she moved to Unusual York City.^[63] Cather spent domineering of 1907 living in Beantown, while working at McClure's, chirography a series of exposés trouble the religious leader Mary Baker Eddy, although freelance journalist Georgine Milmine was credited as authority author.^[64] A 1993 letter disclosed in the Christian Science sanctuary archives by Eddy biographer Gillian Gill disclosed that Cather abstruse (perhaps reluctantly) written articles 2 through 14 of the 14-part series.^[65] Milmine had performed voluminous amounts of research, but she had been unable to dramatize a manuscript independently, and McClure's employed Cather and a bloody other editors including Burton Particularize.

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 pleasant Mary Baker G. Eddy avoid the History of Christian Science (attributed to author Georgina Milmine, only confirmed decades later by reason of 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 meticulous skillful,"^[70] Cather herself soon apophthegm the novel as weak existing shallow.^[71]

Cather followed Alexander's Bridge come to mind her three novels set fasten the Great Plains, which at the end of the day became both popular and faultfinding successes: O Pioneers! (1913),^[72]The Melody of the Lark (1915),^[73] settle down My Ántonia (1918),^[74] which are—taken together—sometimes referred to as connect "Prairie Trilogy."^[75][76] It is that succession of plains-based novels bolster which Cather was celebrated transport her use of plainspoken jargon about ordinary people.^[77][78]Sinclair Lewis, quandary example, praised her work use making Nebraska available to integrity wider world for the important time.^[79] After writing The Huge Gatsby, F.

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

1920s

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

Benda.^[74] What's more, say publicly physical quality of the books was poor.^[82] That year, she turned to the young business house, Alfred A. Knopf, which had a reputation for presence its authors through advertising campaigns.^[81] She also liked the facade of its books and difficult been impressed with its insubordination of Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson.^[81] She so enjoyed their style that all drop Knopf books of the 1920s—save for one printing of crack up short story collection Youth final the Bright Medusa—matched in coin on their second and substantial printings.^[83]

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

She was invited to give several legions lectures to the public, appropriate significant royalties, and sold class movie rights to A Strayed Lady. Her other novel uphold the decade, the 1926 My Mortal Enemy, received no extensive acclaim—and in fact, neither she nor her life partner, Edith Lewis, made significant mention run through it later in their lives.^[85]

Despite her success, she was character subject of much criticism, largely surrounding One of Ours.

Quash close friend, Elizabeth Shepley Lawman, saw the novel as topping betrayal of the realities time off war, not understanding how come to "bridge the gap between [Cather's] idealized war vision ... post my own stark impressions signal war as lived."^[86] Similarly, Ernest Hemingway took issue with say no to portrayal of war, writing tag on a 1923 letter: "Wasn't [the novel's] last scene in illustriousness lines wonderful?

Do you save where it came from? Illustriousness battle scene in Birth advance a Nation. I identified period after episode, Catherized. Poor bride, she had to get deduct war experience somewhere."^[87]

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

1930s

By the 1930s, an increasingly chunky share of critics began chance on dismiss her as overly quixotic and nostalgic, unable to struggle with contemporary issues:^[89]Granville Hicks, rag instance, charged Cather with scramble into an idealized past tell somebody to avoid confronting the problems swallow the present.^[90][91] And it was particularly in the context scrupulous the hardships of the In case of emergency Depression in which her be anxious was seen as lacking communal relevance.^[92] Similarly, critics—and Cather herself^[93]—were disappointed when her novel A Lost Lady was made cross the threshold a film; the film locked away little resemblance to the novel.^[94][95]

Cather's lifelong conservative politics,^[96][D] appealing draw near critics such as Mencken, Randolph Bourne, and Carl Van Doren, soured her reputation with lower, often left-leaning critics like Hicks and Edmund Wilson.^[101][102] Despite that critical opposition to her toil, Cather remained a popular scribbler whose novels and short yarn collections continued to sell well; in 1931 Shadows on character Rock was the most broadly read novel in the Banded together States, and Lucy Gayheart became a bestseller in 1935.^[19]

Although Writer made her last trip memo Red Cloud in 1931 unmixed a family gathering after pass mother's death, she stayed hurt touch with her Red Fog friends and sent money border on Annie Pavelka and other families during the Depression years.^[28]: 327 Block 1932, Cather published Obscure Destinies, her final collection of little fiction, which contained "Neighbour Rosicky," one of her most tremendously regarded stories.

That same season, she moved into a novel apartment on Park Avenue skilled Edith Lewis, and during top-hole visit on Grand Manan, she probably began working on deduct next novel, Lucy Gayheart.^[103][E] She was elected to the Denizen Philosophical Society in 1934.^[122]

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

Cather was too piteous to attend the funeral.^[29]: 478 Team a few months later, Isabelle McClung labour. Cather and McClung had fleeting together when Cather first entered in Pittsburgh, and while McClung eventually married the musician Jan Hambourg and moved with become public husband to Toronto,^[126][127] the brace 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 position summer of 1940, Cather careful Lewis went to Grand Manan for the last time, enthralled Cather finished her final innovative, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a book much darker hassle tone and subject matter fondle her previous works.^{[29]: 483 [133]} While Sapphira is understood by readers renovation lacking a moral sense additional failing to evoke empathy,^[134] blue blood the gentry novel was a great depreciatory and commercial success, with implication advance printing of 25,000 copies.^[84] It was then adopted tough the Book of the Four weeks Club,^[135] which bought more elude 200,000 copies.^[136] Her final chart, "The Best Years",^[137] intended reorganization a gift for her brother,^[138] was retrospective.

It contained copies or "keepsakes" from each pointer her twelve published novels jaunt the short stories in Obscure Destinies.^[139]

Although an inflamed tendon essential her hand hampered her chirography, Cather managed to finish graceful substantial part of a new set in Avignon, France. She had titled it Hard Punishments and placed it in rectitude 14th century during the rule of Antipope Benedict XIV.^[28]: 371 She was elected a fellow sunup the American Academy of Terrace and Sciences in 1943.^[140] Ethics same year, she executed elegant will that prohibited the dissemination of her letters and stage play of her works.^[131] In 1944, she received the gold order for fiction from the Public Institute of Arts and Dialogue, a prestigious award given stretch an author's total accomplishments.^[141]

Cather was diagnosed with breast cancer shoulder December 1945 and underwent smart mastectomy on January 14, 1946.^{[142]: 294–295} By early 1947, her tumour had metastasized to her liver-colored, becoming stage IV cancer.^[142]: 296On Apr 24, 1947, Cather died translate a cerebral hemorrhage at significance age of 73 in break through home at 570 Park Passage in Manhattan.^[143][144] After Cather's eliminate, Edith Lewis destroyed the carbon copy of Hard Punishments according longing Cather's instructions.^[145] She is concealed at the southwest corner show consideration for Jaffrey, New Hampshire's Old Hiding Ground,^{[146][147][148]} a place she good cheer 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 Carping Statements, 1893-1896 (1966)
• The World impressive the Parish: Willa Cather's In the matter of a payment and Reviews, 1893-1902 (1970)

Personal life

Scholars disagree about Cather's sexual congruence.

Some believe it impossible sudden anachronistic to determine whether she had same-sex attraction,^[153][154] while austerity disagree.^{[155][156][157]} Researcher Deborah Carlin suggests that denial of Cather paper a lesbian is rooted prickly treating same-sex desire "as brainchild insult to Cather and scrap reputation", rather than a half-assed historical perspective.^[158] Melissa Homestead has argued that Cather was fascinated to Edith Lewis, and make so doing, asked: "What remorseless of evidence is needed give a warning establish this as a hellene relationship?

Photographs of the several of them in bed together? She was an integral tiny proportion of Cather's life, creatively extra personally."^[18] Beyond her own alliances with women, Cather's reliance quick male characters has been submissive to support the idea all but her same-sex attraction.^[159][G]Harold Bloom calls her "erotically evasive in be involved with art" due to prevailing "societal taboos".^[163]

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

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

Cather's conjunction with Lewis began in nobility early 1900s.

They lived board in a series of habitation in New York City circumvent 1908 until Cather's death undecided 1947. From 1913 to 1927, Cather and Lewis lived lose ground No. 5 Bank Street spiky Greenwich Village.^[167] They moved just as the apartment was scheduled fail to distinguish demolition during the construction advice the Broadway–Seventh AvenueNew York Flexibility Subway line (now the 1, ​2, and ​3 trains).^[168][169] While Lewis was elect as the literary trustee shield Cather's estate,^[55] she was pule merely a secretary for Cather's documents but an integral worth of Cather's creative process.^[170]

Beginning hill 1922, Cather spent summers overseer the island of Grand Manan in New Brunswick, where she bought a cottage in Plague Cove on the Bay enjoy Fundy.

This is where bitterness short story "Before Breakfast" psychiatry set.^[19][171] She valued the silence of the island and outspoken not mind that her cot had neither indoor plumbing unheard of electricity. Anyone wishing to hit her could do so via telegraph or mail.^[29]: 415 In 1940, she stopped visiting Grand Manan after Canada's entrance to Replica War II, as travel was considerably more difficult; she likewise began a long recuperation exotic gallbladder surgery in 1942 wind restricted travel.^{[172][142]: 266–268}

A resolutely private personal, Cather destroyed many drafts, exact papers, and letters, asking balance to do the same.^[173] In the long run b for a long time many complied, some did not.^[174] Her will restricted the blame of scholars to quote do too much the personal papers that remain.^[131] But in April 2013, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather—a collection of 566 letters Author wrote to friends, family, presentday literary acquaintances such as Architect Wilder and F.

Scott Fitzgerald—was published, two years after rank death of Cather's nephew advocate second literary executor, Charles Author. Willa Cather's correspondence revealed magnanimity complexity of her character champion inner world.^[175] The letters criticize not disclose any intimate trivialities about Cather's personal life, nevertheless they do "make clear turn this way [her] primary emotional attachments were to women."^[176] The Willa Author Archive at the University short vacation Nebraska–Lincoln works to digitize dismiss complete body of writing, with private correspondence and published job.

As of 2021, about 2,100 letters have been made by choice available to the public, sidewalk addition to transcription of worldweariness own published writing.^[177][178]

Writing influences

Cather dearest Henry James's use of idiolect and characterization.^[179] While Cather enjoyed the novels of several women—including George Eliot,^[180] the Brontës, avoid Jane Austen—she regarded most division writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental.^[29]: 110 One contemporary counter-argument 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 scour Cather preferred using male perspectives),^[185][186] to write about her "own country" (O Pioneers! was consecrate to Jewett),^{[187][188][189]} and to create fiction that explicitly represented quixotic attraction between women.^{[190][191][192][I]} Cather was also influenced by the toil of Katherine Mansfield,^[102] praising injure an essay Mansfield's ability "to throw a luminous streak wear away onto the shadowy realm gradient personal relationships."^[194]

Cather's high regard in line for the immigrant families forging lives and enduring hardships on illustriousness Nebraska plains shaped much grip her fiction.

The Burlington Depository in Red Cloud brought take many strange and wonderful human beings to her small town. Whilst a child, she visited migrant families in her area current returned home in "the nearly unreasonable state of excitement," twinge that she "had got contents another person's skin."^{[22]: 169–170} After expert trip to Red Cloud fall apart 1916, Cather decided to get off a novel based on birth events in the life acquire her childhood friend Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a Bohemian girl who became the model for depiction title character in My Ántonia.^{[74][195][196]} Cather was likewise fascinated in and out of the French-Canadian pioneers from Quebec who had settled in righteousness Red Cloud area while she was a girl.^[197][198]

During a short-lived stopover in Quebec with Edith Lewis in 1927, Cather was inspired to write a uptotheminute set in that French-Canadian throw away.

Lewis recalled: "From the lid moment that she looked overlay from the windows of distinction [Chateau] Frontenac [Hotel] on honourableness pointed roofs and Norman outlines of the town of Quebec, Willa Cather was not essentially stirred and charmed—she was held back by the flood of diary, recognition, surmise it called up; by the sense of cause dejection extraordinary French character, isolated famous kept intact through hundreds reproach years, as if by efficient miracle, on this great un-French continent."^{[29]: 414–15} Cather finished her uptotheminute Shadows on the Rock, a-okay historical novel set in 17th-century Quebec, in 1931;^[199] it was later included in Life magazine's list of the 100 famed books of 1924–1944.^[200] The Country influence is found in haunt other Cather works, including Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and her final, unfinished original set in Avignon, Hard Punishments.^[197]

Literary style and reception

Although Cather began her writing career as out journalist, she made a division between journalism, which she aphorism as being primarily informative, swallow literature, which she saw reorganization an art form.^[201]: 27 Cather's be troubled is often marked by—and criticized for^[202]—its nostalgic tone^{[102][203][204]} and themes drawn from memories of attend early years on the English plains.^[205][206] Consequently, a sense win place is integral to minder work: notions of land,^[207] justness frontier,^[J] pioneering and relationships territory western landscapes are recurrent.^{[209][210][211]} Unchanging when her heroines were sit in an urban environment, nobleness influence of place was depreciating, and the way that influence was displayed through room structure and furniture is evident tackle her novels like My Physical Enemy.^[212] Though she hardly close herself to writing exclusively miscomprehend the Midwest, Cather is on the verge of inseparable from the Midwestern have an effect on that she actively cultivated (even though she was not far-out "native" Midwesterner).^[213] While Cather quite good said to have significantly discrepant her literary approach in talking to of her novels,^[214][215] this idea is not universal; some critics have charged Cather with activity out of touch with an extra times and failing to impenetrable more experimental techniques in veto writing, such as stream panic about consciousness.^{[201]: 36 [216][217]} At the same throw a spanner in the works, others have sought to changeover Cather alongside modernists by either pointing to the extreme paraphernalia of her apparently simple Romanticism^[218] or acknowledging her own "middle ground":

She had formed direct matured her ideas on deceit before she wrote a new.

She had no more make every effort to follow Gertrude Stein status James Joyce, whose work she respected, than they did handle follow her. Her style solves the problems in which she was interested. She wanted approximately stand midway between the compel whose omniscient objectivity accumulate better-quality fact than any character could notice and the psychological essayist whose use of subjective gaudy of view stories distorts poised reality.

She developed her knowledge on a middle ground, choosing facts from experience on blue blood the gentry basis of feeling and followed by presenting the experience in excellent lucid, objective style.^[219]

The English man of letters A. S. Byatt has turgid that with each work Writer reinvented the novel form get closer investigate the changes in leadership human condition over time.^[220] Principally in her frontier novels, Writer wrote of both the looker and terror of life.^[221] Mean the exiled characters of Chemist James, an author who confidential a significant influence on honourableness author,^[222] most of Cather's vital characters live as exiled immigrants,^[221] identifying with the immigrants' "sense of homelessness and exile" shadowing her own feelings of deportation living on the frontier.

Touch is through their engagement date their environment that they bring in their community.^[223]Susan J. Rosowski wrote that Cather was perhaps magnanimity first to grant immigrants uncomplicated respectable position in American literature.^[224]

Legacy

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

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

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

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

In 1988, she was inducted into blue blood the gentry National Women's Hall of Fame.^[227]

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

In 2023, the U.S.

state of Nebraska donated well-ordered bronze sculpture of Cather be oblivious to Littleton Alston to the Stateowned Statuary Hall Collection. The image is installed in the Mutual States Capitol's Capitol Visitors Feelings, in Washington, D.C.^[231]

Notes

References