American novelist noted for her books about immigrants struggling to make a living in the Midwest during the late 1800s. Various critics have placed Cather among feminist writers, antifeminist writers, and even lesbian writers. She wrote 12 novels, the most popular of which include MY ÁNTONIA (1918), O PIONEERS! (1913), THE SONG OF THE LARK (1915), and DEATH COMES TO THE ARCHBISHOP (1927). In her works Cather created strong female characters, who had the courage and vision to face all obstacles in their difficult lives.
"She was a good artist, and all true art is provincial in the most realistic sense: of the very time and place of its making, out of human beings who are so particularly limited by their situation, whose faces and names are real and whose lives begin each one at an individual unique center. Indeed, Willa Cather was as provincial as Hawthorne or Flaubert or Turgenev, as little concerned with aesthetics and as much with morals as Tolstoy, as obstinately reserved as Melville. In fact she always reminds me of very good literary company, of the particularly admirable masters who formed her youthful tastes, her thinking and feeling." ( Katherine Anne Porter in Lesbian and Bisexual Fiction Writers, ed. by H. Bloom, 1997)
Willa Siebert Cather was born in Back Creek Valley (now Gore), near Winchester, Virginia. At the age of nine she moved with her family to a farm near Red Cloud, in the Nebraska settler country. There she grew up among the immigrants from Europe, most of them coming from Scandinavia, who were establishing homesteads on the Great Plains. The wide open spaces, bare "as a piece of sheet iron", and its people formed the background for half of Cather's novels and many short stories depicting the frontier life on the American plains.
The new ranch was not a success, and in 1884 the family moved to the small railroad town of Red Cloud, where Cather's father opened an insurance business. Cather was educated at home, and later she attended Red Cloud High School. From an early age, Cather was troubled by her sexual identity. She preferred to dress in men's clothing and as a teenager she began signing her name "William Cather, Jr." and later Dr. Will." Cather was also active in community theater productions and often took male roles. At the age of fifteen she was in charge of the local newspaper for three months - her father had foreclosed a mortgage on the newspaper, and because he was not a journalist, he left the paper to Willa.
In 1890 Cather moved to Lincoln to escape the conservatism of the small town - she never married but in later life in New York she found a lifelong companion, Edith Lewis. In a letter to Louise Pound, a close college friend, Cather confessed that she thought it unfair that feminine friendships were 'unnatural'. Cather studied at Latin School (1891-92), and the University of Nebraska (1891-95). While still an undergraduate she began publishing short stories and she also wrote a weekly column for the Nebraska State Journal. Her first story. 'Eric Hermanson's Soul', was a study of the effect of western climatic conditions on the Scandinavian temperament.
After receiving her BA in 1895, Cather lived in Pittsburg with Isabelle McClung. She spent 10 years there, first as a newspaper- woman and then as a high-school teacher of English and Latin. Cather worked as an editorial staff member for Home Monthly and telegraph editor and theatre critic for Daily Leader. In 1897-1901 she was Latin and English teacher at Central High School and then English teacher at Allegheny High School. In 1903 Cather made her debut as a writer with APRIL TWILIGHTS, her only volume of poetry.
"There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before." (from O Pioneers!, 1913)
McClung married in 1915, but Cather had already met Edith Lewis while traveling to New York during this period. At the age of 32 Cather moved to New York to live with Lewis and to edit McClure's Magazine. Her first novel, ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE, appeared in 1912, and was followed a year later by O Pioneers!. Cather was 40 when the book appeared. It was an archetypal success story of a daughter of Swedish immigrant farmers, Alexandra Bergson, who arrives on the wind-blasted prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, and grows up to make it a prosperous farm. Cather resigned in 1912 from McClure's, began writing full-time, and traveled to the Southwest, returning there a few years later. The theme of a journey appeared in her novel, The Song of the Lark, which was partly set in Walnut Canyon, Arizona, and took the form of the opera singer Thea Kronberg's pursuit of artistic excellence. The title of the novel was, according to Cather, inspired by "a rather second-rate" painting in the Chicago Art Institute that showed a peasant girl listening to a bird in a field.
My Ántonia, another story of Nebraska, celebrated the land and the immigrant pioneers, and linked the enduring figure of Àntonia to the life-force itself. The book consists of the loosely-structured memories of Jim Burden, who recounts tales of his Nebraska farm upbringing, and especially of the beautiful immigrant girl from Bohemia, Ántonia Shimerda, whom he loves with a pure innocence. My Ántonia is among Cather's finest work, but later critics have also pointed out that though Cather did not deal specifically with lesbianism, normal sex stands barred from her fictional world and her male characters often have female attitudes and interests. Jim Burden grows up in the novel with an intuitive fear of sex, and only in fantasy does he allow a half-nude woman to smother him with kisses. The original of Ántonia was Annie Sadilek Pavelka, whom Cather had met in childhood and with whom she maintained a lifelong friendship: "Of the people who interested me most as a child was the Bohemian hired girl of one of our neighbors, who was so good to me... Annie fascinated me and and I always had it in mind to write a story about her." (from Lesbian and Bisexual Fiction Writers)
In 1922 Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel ONE OF OURS, which depicted a boy from the Western plains, who leaves home to fight in World War I and is killed in France. Ernest Hemingway, in a letter to the critic Edmund Wilson, expressed disdain at Cather's having received the prize, remarking that she must have drawn the battlefield scene from the film Birth of a Nation.
"Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is." (from The Song of the Lark, 1915)
In the years following WW I Cather became gravely distressed by the loss of spiritual values that accompanied the growth of materialism and technology in the 20th-century. Her judgment of contemporary society was seen in A LOST LADY (1923), depicting the conflict between heroic builders of the West and cruel men of the present, and THE PROFESSOR'S HOUSE (1925), presenting a conflict between the middle-aged disillusion of Professor St Peter with his memories of his favorite student, who had discovered ancient Indian civilization in New Mexico.
Cather's twelve novels and short fiction fall into three groups: tales influenced by Henry James, works dealing with immigrant life in the West, and historical novels, such as DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP (1927). The novel is based on the lives of Bishop Jean Babtiste L'Amy and his vicar Father Joseph Machebeauf, who organize the new Roman Catholic diocese of New Mexico. The novel focuses on Bishop Jean Latour's and vicar Father Joseph Vaillant's inner conflicts, their relationship with the land and the tension between Old World values and life in the New World. Also Cather's own world- view was changing. She joined the Episcopalian Church and demonstrated her growing distaste for modern values.
Cather published little in her last years. She developed a close friendship with Yehudi Menuhin and his sisters. In NOT UNDER FORTY (1936) Cather recorded her own debt as writer to Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), who wrote about life in New England. Cather's last novel, SAPPHIRA AND THE SLAVE (1940), looks at the relationships between African-American women, and mothers and daughters. It is her only novel which was set in the Virginia of her grandmother. Cather died on April 24, 1947
For further reading: Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism by Joan Acocella (2000); Willa Cather: Queering America by Marilee Lindemann (1999); The Stuff of Our Forebears by Joyce McDonald (1998); Cather Studies, ed. by Susan J. Rosowski (1996); Willa Cather by E. Wagenknecht (1994); A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Willa Cather, ed. by Everett Emerson (1994); A Life Saved Up by Hermione Lee (1989); Willa Cather: A Literary Life by J. Woodress (1987); Willa Cather in Person by Brent L. Bohlke et al (1987); Willa Cather by Sharon O'Brien (1987); Willa Cather by Philip Gerber (1975, rev. ed. 1995); The Landscape and the Looking Glass by J.H. Randall (1960): Willa Cather and Her Critics ed. by J. Schroeter (1967); Willa Cather: A Critical Biography by E.K. Brown (1953) - NOTE: 'One of the most charming places in New York' wrote Willa Cather about Greenwich Village, where she lived like Tom Paine, James Fenimore Cooper, William Jennings Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, e.e. cummings, John Dos Passos, Floyd Dell, Marianne Moore, Eugene O'Neill, and many other writers and artists, especially radical or experimental. In the 1910s 'the house of genius' near Washington Square Park had as inhabitants Cather, Dreiser, O.Henry, and Crane.
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