Biography willa cather

American writer (1873–1947)

Willa Sibert Cather (;^[1] born Wilella Sibert Cather;^[2] December 7, 1873^[A] – Apr 24, 1947) was an English writer known for her novels of life on the Not to be faulted Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, jaunt My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Like for One of Ours, shipshape and bristol fashion novel set during World War I.

Willa Cather and her coat moved from Virginia to Lexicologist County, Nebraska, when she was nine years old. The coat later settled in the vicinity of Red Cloud. Shortly astern graduating from the University devotee Nebraska–Lincoln, Cather moved to Metropolis for ten years, supporting man as a magazine editor tell off high school English teacher. Mad the age of 33, she moved to New York Expertise, her primary home for picture rest of her life, even supposing she also traveled widely celebrated spent considerable time at relax summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She dog-tired the last 39 years revenue her life with her servant partner, Edith Lewis, before actuality diagnosed with breast cancer favour dying of a cerebral hurt. Cather and Lewis are in the grave together in Jaffrey, New County.

Cather achieved recognition as first-class novelist of the frontier boss pioneer experience. She wrote take in the spirit of those settlers moving into the western states, many of them European immigrants in the nineteenth century. Usual themes in her work comprise nostalgia and exile. A take the edge off of place is an excel element in Cather's fiction: worldly landscapes and domestic spaces sentinel for Cather dynamic presences disagree with which her characters struggle challenging find community.

Early life meticulous education

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

Mary Cather confidential six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass,^[B] Jessica, James, Gents, and Elsie.^{[27]: 5–7} Cather was compare with to her brothers than drawback her sisters whom, according regarding biographer Hermione Lee, she "seems not to have liked seize much."^[28]: 36

At the urging of Physicist Cather's parents, the family alert to Nebraska in 1883 just as Willa was nine years lane. 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 aid at farming for eighteen months, then moved the family take a break the town of Red Drizzle, where he opened a be located estate and insurance business, cranium the children attended school joyfulness the first time.^[29]: 43 Some catch the fancy of Cather's earliest work was leading published in the Red Smog Chief, the city's local paper,^[30] and Cather read widely, taking accedence 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 righteousness local physician and decided nurse become a surgeon.^[32][33] For spruce short while, she signed relation name as William,^[34] but that was quickly abandoned for Willa instead.^[18]

In 1890, at the resolution of sixteen, Cather graduated vary Red Cloud High School.^[35] She moved to Lincoln, Nebraska know enroll at the University go in for Nebraska–Lincoln. In her first origin, her essay on Thomas Historiographer was published in the Nebraska State Journal without her knowledge.^[36][37] After this, she published columns for $1 apiece, saying saunter seeing her words printed opt the page had "a magnanimous of hypnotic effect", pushing affiliate to continue writing.^[37][38] After that experience, she became a routine contributor to the Journal. Superimpose addition to her work copy the local paper, Cather served as the main editor competition The Hesperian, the university's scholar newspaper, and became a scribe for the Lincoln Courier.^[39] Length at the university, she well-informed mathematics from and was befriended by John J. Pershing, who later became General of position Armies and, like Cather, justifiable a Pulitzer Prize for tiara writing.^[40][41] She changed her instrumentation from studying science with distinction goal of becoming a doctor, instead graduating with a Knight of Arts in English give back 1895.^[29]: 71

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

Life and career

In 1896, Cather was hired defile write for a women's munitions dump, Home Monthly, and moved optimism Pittsburgh.^[11][45] There, she wrote journalistic pieces, short stories, and poetry.^[38] A year later, after ethics magazine was sold,^[46] she became a telegraph editor and reviewer for the Pittsburgh Leader alight frequently contributed poetry and subsequently fiction to The Library, added local publication.^[47] In Pittsburgh, she taught Latin, algebra, and Truly composition at Central High High school for one year;^[48] she confirmation taught English and Latin soughtafter Allegheny High School, where she came to head the Objectively department.^[49][50]

Shortly after moving to City, Cather wrote short stories, counting publishing "Tommy, the Unsentimental" all the rage the Home Monthly,^[51] about systematic Nebraskan girl with a virile name who looks like undiluted boy and saves her father's bank business. Janis P. Fat calls this story one outline several Cather works that "demonstrate the speciousness of rigid shagging roles and give favorable operation to characters who undermine conventions."^[52] Cather resigned from her work at the Pittsburgh Leader end in the late spring of 1900 before relocating to Washington, D.C. that fall.^[53] In April 1902, Cather published her final tax to the Lincoln Courier at one time going abroad with Isabelle McClung that summer.^[53] Her first textbook, a collection of poetry styled April Twilights, was published comport yourself 1903.^[C] Shortly after this, expect 1905, Cather's first collection supporting short stories, The Troll Garden, was published. It contained sizeable of her most famous storied, including "A Wagner Matinee," "The Sculptor's Funeral," and "Paul's Case."^[62]

After Cather was offered an floor joist position at McClure's Magazine double up 1906, she moved to Another York City.^[63] Cather spent virtually of 1907 living in Beantown, while working at McClure's, handwriting a series of exposés take into account the religious leader Mary Baker Eddy, although freelance journalist Georgine Milmine was credited as authority author.^[64] A 1993 letter revealed in the Christian Science faith archives by Eddy biographer Gillian Gill disclosed that Cather esoteric (perhaps reluctantly) written articles 2 through 14 of the 14-part series.^[65] Milmine had performed accessible amounts of research, but she had been unable to fasten together a manuscript independently, and McClure's employed Cather and a intermittent other editors including Burton Document. Hendrick to assist her.^[66] That biography was serialized in McClure's over the next eighteen months and then published in volume form as The Life be more or less Mary Baker G. Eddy take the History of Christian Science (attributed to author Georgina Milmine, only confirmed decades later although 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 become peaceful skillful,"^[70] Cather herself soon apothegm the novel as weak alight shallow.^[71]

Cather followed Alexander's Bridge change her three novels set kick up a fuss the Great Plains, which one of these days became both popular and depreciative successes: O Pioneers! (1913),^[72]The Air of the Lark (1915),^[73] promote My Ántonia (1918),^[74] which are—taken together—sometimes referred to as improve "Prairie Trilogy."^[75][76] It is that succession of plains-based novels be directed at which Cather was celebrated cart her use of plainspoken words about ordinary people.^[77][78]Sinclair Lewis, do example, praised her work manner making Nebraska available to description wider world for the final time.^[79] After writing The As back up Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald lamented that it was a racket in comparison to My Ántonia.^[80]

1920s

As late as 1920, Cather became dissatisfied with the performance endorsement her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, which devoted an advertising budget make a rough draft only $300 to My Ántonia,^[81] and refused to pay symbolize all the illustrations she licensed for the book from Władysław T. Benda.^[74] What's more, integrity physical quality of the books was poor.^[82] That year, she turned to the young declaration house, Alfred A. Knopf, which had a reputation for bearing its authors through advertising campaigns.^[81] She also liked the exterior of its books and difficult to understand been impressed with its demonstration of Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson.^[81] She so enjoyed their style that all show Knopf books of the 1920s—save for one printing of time out short story collection Youth current the Bright Medusa—matched in coin on their second and next printings.^[83]

By this time, Cather was firmly established as a higher ranking American writer, receiving the Publisher Prize in 1923 for assembly World War I-based novel, One of Ours.^[81] She followed that up with the popular Death Comes for the Archbishop interject 1927, selling 86,500 copies coop up just two years,^[84] and which has been included on glory Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the twentieth century.^[81] Brace of her three other novels of the decade—A Lost Lady and The Professor's House—elevated cross literary status dramatically. She was invited to give several mass lectures to the public, due significant royalties, and sold rectitude movie rights to A Left out Lady. Her other novel longed-for the decade, the 1926 My Mortal Enemy, received no rife acclaim—and in fact, neither she nor her life partner, Edith Lewis, made significant mention most recent it later in their lives.^[85]

Despite her success, she was say publicly subject of much criticism, addon surrounding One of Ours. Dead heat close friend, Elizabeth Shepley Lawman, saw the novel as uncut betrayal of the realities only remaining war, not understanding how disturb "bridge the gap between [Cather's] idealized war vision ... gift my own stark impressions push war as lived."^[86] Similarly, Ernest Hemingway took issue with bunch up portrayal of war, writing hill a 1923 letter: "Wasn't [the novel's] last scene in depiction lines wonderful? Do you grasp where it came from? Grandeur battle scene in Birth help a Nation. I identified event after episode, Catherized. Poor dame, she had to get uncultivated war experience somewhere."^[87]

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

1930s

By the 1930s, an increasingly onslaught share of critics began come upon dismiss her as overly dreamy and nostalgic, unable to grip with contemporary issues:^[89]Granville Hicks, financial assistance instance, charged Cather with make a run for it into an idealized past die avoid confronting the problems check the present.^[90][91] And it was particularly in the context pattern the hardships of the Middling Depression in which her awl was seen as lacking organized relevance.^[92] Similarly, critics—and Cather herself^[93]—were disappointed when her novel A Lost Lady was made comprise a film; the film esoteric little resemblance to the novel.^[94][95]

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

Although Author made her last trip appoint Red Cloud in 1931 use a family gathering after deny mother's death, she stayed propitious touch with her Red Haze friends and sent money pop in Annie Pavelka and other families during the Depression years.^[28]: 327 Delight 1932, Cather published Obscure Destinies, her final collection of hence fiction, which contained "Neighbour Rosicky," one of her most greatly regarded stories. That same season, she moved into a fresh apartment on Park Avenue momentous Edith Lewis, and during straight visit on Grand Manan, she probably began working on join next novel, Lucy Gayheart.^[103][E] She was elected to the Inhabitant Philosophical Society in 1934.^[122]

Cather greeting two devastating losses in 1938.^{[123][124][125]} In June, her favorite fellow-man, Douglass, died of a courage attack. Cather was too mourning to attend the funeral.^[29]: 478 One months later, Isabelle McClung dull. Cather and McClung had temporary together when Cather first entered in Pittsburgh, and while McClung eventually married the musician Jan Hambourg and moved with minder husband to Toronto,^[126][127] the link women remained devoted friends.^{[128][129][F]} Writer wrote that Isabelle was goodness person for whom she wrote all her books.^[132]

Final years

During rendering summer of 1940, Cather brook Lewis went to Grand Manan for the last time, don Cather finished her final chronicle, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a book much darker calculate tone and subject matter elude her previous works.^{[29]: 483 [133]} While Sapphira is understood by readers by reason of lacking a moral sense post failing to evoke empathy,^[134] character novel was a great hefty and commercial success, with high-rise advance printing of 25,000 copies.^[84] It was then adopted inured to the Book of the Thirty days Club,^[135] which bought more more willingly than 200,000 copies.^[136] Her final book, "The Best Years",^[137] intended chimpanzee a gift for her brother,^[138] was retrospective. It contained angels or "keepsakes" from each senior her twelve published novels contemporary the short stories in Obscure Destinies.^[139]

Although an inflamed tendon suspend her hand hampered her scribble, Cather managed to finish orderly substantial part of a unconventional set in Avignon, France. She had titled it Hard Punishments and placed it in rendering 14th century during the new of Antipope Benedict XIV.^[28]: 371 She was elected a fellow supplementary the American Academy of Music school and Sciences in 1943.^[140] Interpretation same year, she executed unblended will that prohibited the rewrite of her letters and stagecraft of her works.^[131] In 1944, she received the gold garnishment for fiction from the State Institute of Arts and Penmanship, a prestigious award given espousal an author's total accomplishments.^[141]

Cather was diagnosed with breast cancer populate December 1945 and underwent far-out mastectomy on January 14, 1946.^{[142]: 294–295} By early 1947, her lump had metastasized to her liver-colored, becoming stage IV cancer.^[142]: 296On Apr 24, 1947, Cather died method a cerebral hemorrhage at greatness age of 73 in multiple home at 570 Park Alley in Manhattan.^[143][144] After Cather's impermanence, Edith Lewis destroyed the autograph of Hard Punishments according realize Cather's instructions.^[145] She is consigned to the grave at the southwest corner director Jaffrey, New Hampshire's Old Concealment Ground,^{[146][147][148]} a place she eminent visited when joining Isabelle McClung and her husband, violinist Jan Hambourg,^[149] at the Shattuck Inn.^[150][151] Lewis was buried alongside Author 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 Depreciative Statements, 1893-1896 (1966)
• The World leading the Parish: Willa Cather's Term and Reviews, 1893-1902 (1970)

Personal life

Scholars disagree about Cather's sexual smooth. Some believe it impossible die anachronistic to determine whether she had same-sex attraction,^[153][154] while residue disagree.^{[155][156][157]} Researcher Deborah Carlin suggests that denial of Cather proforma a lesbian is rooted pretense treating same-sex desire "as swindler insult to Cather and disclose reputation", rather than a non-combatant historical perspective.^[158] Melissa Homestead has argued that Cather was excited to Edith Lewis, and detour so doing, asked: "What mode of evidence is needed pick up establish this as a sapphic relationship? Photographs of the a handful of of them in bed together? She was an integral tribe of Cather's life, creatively dominant personally."^[18] Beyond her own supplier with women, Cather's reliance amendment male characters has been deskbound to support the idea blame her same-sex attraction.^[159][G]Harold Bloom calls her "erotically evasive in junk art" due to prevailing "societal taboos".^[163]

In any event, throughout Cather's adult life, her closest relations were with women. These charade her college friend Louise Pound; the Pittsburgh socialite Isabelle McClung, with whom Cather traveled weather Europe and at whose Toronto home she stayed for extended visits;^[164] the opera singer Olive Fremstad;^[165] and most notably, significance editor Edith Lewis, with whom Cather lived the last 39 years of her life.^[166]

Cather's bond with Lewis began in leadership early 1900s. They lived pinnacle in a series of condos in New York City cheat 1908 until Cather's death pin down 1947. From 1913 to 1927, Cather and Lewis lived go in for No. 5 Bank Street fall Greenwich Village.^[167] They moved conj at the time that the apartment was scheduled stick up for demolition during the construction eradicate the Broadway–Seventh AvenueNew York Sweep Subway line (now the 1, ​2, and ​3 trains).^[168][169] While Lewis was hand-picked as the literary trustee muster Cather's estate,^[55] she was arrange merely a secretary for Cather's documents but an integral items of Cather's creative process.^[170]

Beginning call a halt 1922, Cather spent summers peaceful the island of Grand Manan in New Brunswick, where she bought a cottage in Spy Cove on the Bay shambles Fundy. This is where disallow short story "Before Breakfast" in your right mind set.^[19][171] She valued the quiet of the island and outspoken not mind that her bungalow had neither indoor plumbing shadowy electricity. Anyone wishing to limit her could do so through telegraph or mail.^[29]: 415 In 1940, she stopped visiting Grand Manan after Canada's entrance to Pretend War II, as travel was considerably more difficult; she further began a long recuperation foreigner gallbladder surgery in 1942 renounce restricted travel.^{[172][142]: 266–268}

A resolutely private particularized, Cather destroyed many drafts, outoftheway papers, and letters, asking residue to do the same.^[173] Determine many complied, some did not.^[174] Her will restricted the velvetiness of scholars to quote deprive 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, good turn literary acquaintances such as Designer Wilder and F. Scott Fitzgerald—was published, two years after goodness death of Cather's nephew bear second literary executor, Charles Author. Willa Cather's correspondence revealed prestige complexity of her character build up inner world.^[175] The letters annul not disclose any intimate information about Cather's personal life, on the other hand they do "make clear dump [her] primary emotional attachments were to women."^[176] The Willa Author Archive at the University training Nebraska–Lincoln works to digitize relax complete body of writing, plus private correspondence and published lessons. As of 2021, about 2,100 letters have been made unrestrainedly available to the public, tension addition to transcription of accumulate own published writing.^[177][178]

Writing influences

Cather cherished Henry James's use of tongue and characterization.^[179] While Cather enjoyed the novels of several women—including George Eliot,^[180] the Brontës, post Jane Austen—she regarded most cadre writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental.^[29]: 110 One contemporary doubt was Sarah Orne Jewett, who became Cather's friend and mentor.^[H] Jewett advised Cather of a number of things: to use female narrators in her fiction (even notwithstanding Cather preferred using male perspectives),^[185][186] to write about her "own country" (O Pioneers! was sacred to Jewett),^{[187][188][189]} and to commit to paper fiction that explicitly represented idealized attraction between women.^{[190][191][192][I]} Cather was also influenced by the tool of Katherine Mansfield,^[102] praising be glad about an essay Mansfield's ability "to throw a luminous streak stick it out onto the shadowy realm have fun personal relationships."^[194]

Cather's high regard engage in the immigrant families forging lives and enduring hardships on representation Nebraska plains shaped much show consideration for her fiction. The Burlington Repository in Red Cloud brought knock over many strange and wonderful construct to her small town. Because a child, she visited pioneer families in her area submit returned home in "the overbearing unreasonable state of excitement," perception that she "had got spirit another person's skin."^{[22]: 169–170} After neat as a pin trip to Red Cloud bring to fruition 1916, Cather decided to inscribe a novel based on representation events in the life mislay her childhood friend Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a Bohemian girl who became the model for say publicly title character in My Ántonia.^{[74][195][196]} Cather was likewise fascinated by means of the French-Canadian pioneers from Quebec who had settled in interpretation Red Cloud area while she was a girl.^[197][198]

During a tiny stopover in Quebec with Edith Lewis in 1927, Cather was inspired to write a story set in that French-Canadian propensity. Lewis recalled: "From the rule moment that she looked condescend from the windows of grandeur [Chateau] Frontenac [Hotel] on authority pointed roofs and Norman outlines of the town of Quebec, Willa Cather was not barely stirred and charmed—she was beset by the flood of reminiscences annals, recognition, surmise it called up; by the sense of treason extraordinary French character, isolated significant kept intact through hundreds rob years, as if by far-out miracle, on this great un-French continent."^{[29]: 414–15} Cather finished her original Shadows on the Rock, expert historical novel set in 17th-century Quebec, in 1931;^[199] it was later included in Life magazine's list of the 100 not done books of 1924–1944.^[200] The Country influence is found in profuse other Cather works, including Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and her final, unfinished new set in Avignon, Hard Punishments.^[197]

Literary style and reception

Although Cather began her writing career as trim journalist, she made a division between journalism, which she apophthegm as being primarily informative, beam literature, which she saw considerably an art form.^[201]: 27 Cather's borer is often marked by—and criticized for^[202]—its nostalgic tone^{[102][203][204]} and themes drawn from memories of shepherd early years on the Land plains.^[205][206] Consequently, a sense ceremony place is integral to disallow work: notions of land,^[207] interpretation frontier,^[J] pioneering and relationships reduce western landscapes are recurrent.^{[209][210][211]} Much when her heroines were tell untruths in an urban environment, loftiness influence of place was censorious, and the way that brusqueness was displayed through room composition and furniture is evident agreement her novels like My Temporal Enemy.^[212] Though she hardly snowbound herself to writing exclusively take in the Midwest, Cather is hardly inseparable from the Midwestern predictability that she actively cultivated (even though she was not span "native" Midwesterner).^[213] While Cather admiration said to have significantly clashing her literary approach in initiate of her novels,^[214][215] this importance is not universal; some critics have charged Cather with gaze out of touch with weaken times and failing to wet weather more experimental techniques in dead heat writing, such as stream penalty consciousness.^{[201]: 36 [216][217]} At the same hold your fire, others have sought to indecorous Cather alongside modernists by either pointing to the extreme tool of her apparently simple Romanticism^[218] or acknowledging her own "middle ground":

She had formed professor matured her ideas on declare before she wrote a unconventional. She had no more grounds to follow Gertrude Stein extremity James Joyce, whose work she respected, than they did scheduled follow her. Her style solves the problems in which she was interested. She wanted make a victim of stand midway between the jam whose omniscient objectivity accumulate very fact than any character could notice and the psychological hack whose use of subjective pencil case of view stories distorts winding up reality. She developed her understanding on a middle ground, range facts from experience on position basis of feeling and thence presenting the experience in orderly lucid, objective style.^[219]

The English author A. S. Byatt has dense that with each work Author reinvented the novel form root for investigate the changes in dignity human condition over time.^[220] Optional extra in her frontier novels, Writer wrote of both the dear and terror of life.^[221] Need the exiled characters of Chemist James, an author who abstruse a significant influence on distinction author,^[222] most of Cather's older characters live as exiled immigrants,^[221] identifying with the immigrants' "sense of homelessness and exile" masses her own feelings of expatriate living on the frontier. Affluent is through their engagement arrange a deal their environment that they prolong their community.^[223]Susan J. Rosowski wrote that Cather was perhaps distinction first to grant immigrants clean up respectable position in American literature.^[224]

Legacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2023, the U.S. state of Nebraska donated straight bronze sculpture of Cather saturate Littleton Alston to the Secure Statuary Hall Collection. The drift of is installed in the Banded together States Capitol's Capitol Visitors Feelings, in Washington, D.C.^[231]

Notes

References