Who is willa cather

Willa Cather was born on December 7, , near Winchester, Va. Her father was a farmer and businessman; her mother a schoolteacher. In , the family moved to Nebraska to join her Cather grandparents and uncle. This uprooting left her deeply homesick for Virginia. She listened to the stories of her immigrant neighbors from Bohemia, Denmark, Norway and Sweden and their struggles to make a living from the land and find acceptance from their American-born neighbors.

She was one of the truest artists I ever knew in the keenness and sensitiveness of her enjoyment, in her love of people and in her willingness to take pains. I did not realize all this as a child, but Annie fascinated me, and I always had it in my mind to write a story about her. She dedicated the novel to two of her childhood friends, Carrie and Irene Miner.

Carrie Miner is the model for Frances Harling and Mrs. Miner, for whom Annie Sadilek worked, is portrayed as Mrs. Cather was taught at home by her grandmother and mother before starting school. She read widely in the classics, wrote and performed plays and delivered the valedictory speech at her high school graduation.

At age 16, she entered the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. She changed her college studies from medicine to classics when a professor, unbeknownst to her, submitted one of her essays to the Nebraska State Journal. The sight of her name in print inspired her to dedicate her life to writing. As one of "those genius children," it was clear to all that the Cathers' oldest daughter was going somewhere, that she had a future. Cather had befriended the local doctors, so initially she seemed to be defying norms by heading toward medicine.

In , at the age of sixteen, Cather graduated from Red Cloud high school along with two others, both boys. Each delivered a graduation speech on the stage of the Opera House.

Cather's—published in the Red Cloud Chief —was an answer to local people who had evidently been critical of her interests in biology and medicine.

James Woodress, who published the whole text, called it "a ringing defense of scientific inquiry" which "ranges from the dawn of history to the present moment" Ironically, the Chief foresaw great accomplishment for the two boys but was silent on Cather's prospects. Shortly after graduating from high school, Cather left for the University of Nebraska in Lincoln where she hoped to become a doctor.

That goal changed when her first English professor submitted her essay on Carlyle to the Lincoln Journal and the paper published it—Cather later recalled it was at that moment she decided to become a writer. Cather spent five years at the university. Her first year was spent in the university's preparatory school fulfilling matriculation requirements. Having just arrived from a small town, she took full advantage of the capital's opportunities—cultural, social, and especially literary.

She joined the student newspaper, the Hesperian , and later became its managing editor. She also served as literary editor of the Sombrero , her class yearbook. Beyond such work, Cather began a career as a journalist by writing extensively for both the Lincoln Courier and the Nebraska State Journal , writing a column for the first and reviewing extensively for the second. Although she did this in part for the money it paid—she supported herself during —95—Cather established herself as a remarkable presence in the intellectual world of both the university and Lincoln while she was earning her degree.

That her nonfiction writings from this period make up three large volumes— The World and The Parish two volumes and The Kingdom of Art — is indicative of the tremendous drive the young Cather evinced. Viola Roseboro', later a colleague of Cather's at McClure's and probably the person who brought Cather to the attention of S.

McClure, once remarked that "if Willa Cather had been a scrub-woman, she would have scrubbed much harder than other scrub-women" Lewis Following her graduation in June , Cather returned to Red Cloud for a year, before securing, through connections she had made while reviewing in Lincoln, a position running the Home Monthly magazine in Pittsburgh.

Then an imitator of the Ladies Home Journal , the Home Monthly was not much of a publication but it was an important first step for Cather—she wrote much of the material it published herself, both fiction and nonfiction, commissioned artwork, managed its layout and printing.

More than work, in Pittsburgh—then a major city of some ,—Cather took full advantage of the city's cultural scene. She attended live performances, wrote criticism for concerts and the dramatic arts for Pittsburgh Daily Leader , sent some of the same material back to the Nebraska State Journal , and pursued an active social life. In many ways, Cather's time in Pittsburgh was her making as a professional, for there she established her own base and her own connections, developing herself as a journalist and a writer of fiction, branching out.

After her first year there she left the Home Monthly to work as the telegraph editor on the Pittsburgh Daily Leader ; she stayed there and with other journalism until early , when she accepted a high school teaching position in Pittsburgh, later moving across the river to Allegheny, where she taught until she moved to New York in The most notable friendship Cather made in Pittsburgh was with Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a prominent Pittsburgh judge.

Without question the closest emotional attachment Cather had outside of her immediate family, Isabelle inspired, encouraged and fostered Cather's writing, bringing her into the McClung home in one of the best Pittsburgh neighborhoods nearby neighbors were the Carnegies, the Fricks and providing a quiet space where Cather could write.

The two set off in on Cather's first trip to Europe—to Britain and France; there they met Dorothy Canfield, a friend of Cather's from Lincoln who would become a prominent writer herself, and the three had made a well-known visit with A.

Housman, then a poet Cather much admired. While still writing fiction, Cather was then concentrating on poetry—her first book, April Twilights , appeared from a vanity press in It was well-reviewed and, along with the stories she had been publishing and the connections she had made, probably played some role in Cather's coming to the attention of S. McClure, then one of America's best-known editors. His McClure's Magazine had become synonymous with the exposure and eradication of social ills—"muckraking"—and it was also the leading monthly publishing fiction, poetry, and other items of cultural interest.

This expereimce transformed Cather's situation since, as was his practice, McClure promised her a great deal in that interview; he would publish her stories in his magazine—some she had previously submitted had been rejected—and also in book form.

More than that, he would watch and help her career. Yet the most momentous result of Cather's first interview with McClure was his decision, when his magazine was having difficulties with its staff in , to offer her a job and bring her to New York.

She accepted, and this was the decision that transformed her career. Building upon her solid foundation as an energetic journalist in Lincoln and Pittsburgh, drawing upon her own then still nascent accomplishments as a fiction writer and poet, Cather was placed in at the nexus of professional literary life in the United States. Along with the magazine's muckraking—a dimension of its offerings which, although some have argued so, Cather never eschewed—McClure and McClure's had relations at the time with most prominent writers writing in English.

When she met McClure in , Cather also met his family and Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, who was visiting the McClures. Among his prominent authors were Joseph Conrad and Henry James, and the magazine was publishing the early poetry of William Butler Yeats.

As such a situation confirms, at McClure's Cather herself became one of the most influential editors in America, for by she was its Managing Editor and deep into its myriad details.

Working at McClure's launched Cather in many ways. Arriving in New York in she was soon sent to Boston to work on the magazine's biography of Mary Baker Eddy which needed checking and rewriting. There she met Sarah Orne Jewett, subsequently an important literary mentor and also Ferris Greenslet, a prominent editor at Houghton Mifflin.

As a reviewer he had been impressed by April Twilights ; as an editor he published Cather's first four novels and, even after she shifted publishers, he remained a lifelong friend. At McClure's, too, Cather connected with Edith Lewis, a person she knew from Lincoln who was to be her closest lifetime companion—the two took an apartment together on Washington Square shortly after Cather arrived.

They lived together for the rest of Cather's life and, along with McClung, Lewis was to foster Cather's fiction. Because she also came from an editorial background, though, Lewis's work was that of an editorial collaborator while McClung was more of a muse. Scholars are still discovering the specific extent of Lewis's work on Cather's books, but there is no question that her work was far more than technical; much of it was literary. Ironically, throughout her time at McClure's , Cather struggled to break away from the magazine to write—Cather was able to finally leave full-time editorial work in early Even so, the connection was critical to Cather's development as a writer—once she had made contact with McClure he published her stories "The Sculpter's Funeral," "Paul's Case" , but after she arrived there her contributions to the magazine—poems, fiction, nonfiction articles—increased.

Even as she left McClure's Cather continued to publish there; it serialized her first novel, Alexander's Bridge , in Once she had completed her second novel the one she called her real "first novel" since it offers her true material , O Pioneers!

McClure tell his own story orally; having done so, she wrote his autobiography, one ironically titled My Autobiography. It was published in and, as is now quite clear, had a major and sustained effect on Cather's narrative technique in her own fiction.

Willa Cather left behind a canon that was both plainspoken and elegant, accessible and deeply nuanced. Her portrayals of immigrants and women and of immigrant women have been at the center of much modern scholarship. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile.

Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Amanda Prahl. Assistant Editor. Amanda Prahl is a playwright, lyricist, freelance writer, and university instructor.

Cather is now widely understood as a lesbian. She lived for 38 years in domestic partnership with Edith Lewis, a professional editor, in New York City. Lewis's editorial skills probably contributed to Cather's elegant prose style, as the two of them went over her novels together before publication.

Cather said O Pioneers! The other [ Alexander's Bridge ] was like riding in a park, with someone not altogether congenial, to whom you had to be talking all the time. She had earlier written a novel called "Fanny" and set in Pittsburgh that never made it into print. The one for which she later won a Pulitzer Prize, One of Ours , was thought by many to be a weaker work.

Although it follows its hero, Claude Wheeler, to the battlefields of World War I, she insisted it should not be understood as a war novel and had to be talked out of titling it simply Claude. Although Cather often drew on her own life in writing her novels, she always--or almost always--disguised her autobiographical presence.

She didn't want to write about herself in a direct or obvious way. Yet her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl , ends with a memory of hers from her own childhood told in the first person. The memory draws so directly from her own life, in fact, that she told her brother Roscoe, "Without that literal account of something that happened to me when I was between five and six years old, the whole book would be constructed , not lived.

The Millions.