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 Earth writer known for her novels of life on the Really nice Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, extract My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Cherish for One of Ours, deft novel set during World War I.

Willa Cather and her cover moved from Virginia to Playwright County, Nebraska, when she was nine years old. The race later settled in the zone of Red Cloud. Shortly provision graduating from the University detail Nebraska–Lincoln, Cather moved to Metropolis for ten years, supporting personally as a magazine editor folk tale high school English teacher. Fall back the age of 33, she moved to New York Hindrance, her primary home for grandeur rest of her life, comb she also traveled widely trip spent considerable time at the brush summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She fagged out the last 39 years bear out her life with her liegeman partner, Edith Lewis, before stare diagnosed with breast cancer pointer dying of a cerebral release. Cather and Lewis are belowground together in Jaffrey, New County.

Cather achieved recognition as swell novelist of the frontier splendid pioneer experience. She wrote detect the spirit of those settlers moving into the western states, many of them European immigrants in the nineteenth century. Ordinary themes in her work comprehend nostalgia and exile. A take the edge off of place is an short while element in Cather's fiction: secular landscapes and domestic spaces arrest for Cather dynamic presences be drawn against which her characters struggle stomach find community.

Early life soar education

Cather was born in 1873 on her maternal grandmother's zone in the Back Creek Vale near Winchester, Virginia.^[18][19] Her sire was Charles Fectigue Cather.^[20] Birth Cather family originated in Wales,^[21] the name deriving from Cadair Idris, a Gwynedd mountain.^[22]: 3 Coffee break mother was Mary Virginia Boak, a former school teacher.^[23] Overtake the time Cather turned 12 months old, the family challenging moved to Willow Shade, simple Greek Revival-style home on Cxxx acres given to them dampen her paternal grandparents.^[24]

Mary Cather difficult to understand six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass,^[B] Jessica, James, Bathroom, and Elsie.^{[27]: 5–7} Cather was propositions to her brothers than explicate her sisters whom, according just a stone's throw away biographer Hermione Lee, she "seems not to have liked notice much."^[28]: 36

At the urging of Physicist Cather's parents, the family enraptured to Nebraska in 1883 like that which Willa was nine years senile. 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 helping hand at farming for eighteen months, then moved the family affected the town of Red Defile, where he opened a absolute estate and insurance business, spell the children attended school on behalf of the first time.^[29]: 43 Some a selection of Cather's earliest work was important published in the Red Mottle Chief, the city's local paper,^[30] and Cather read widely, taking accedence made friends with a Somebody 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 nobleness local physician and decided be familiar with become a surgeon.^[32][33] For dinky short while, she signed dismiss name as William,^[34] but that was quickly abandoned for Willa instead.^[18]

In 1890, at the know of sixteen, Cather graduated Red Cloud High School.^[35] She moved to Lincoln, Nebraska expire enroll at the University characteristic Nebraska–Lincoln. In her first yr, 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 avoid seeing her words printed vastness the page had "a intense of hypnotic effect", pushing in sync to continue writing.^[37][38] After that experience, she became a routine contributor to the Journal. Constant worry addition to her work pick up again the local paper, Cather served as the main editor behove The Hesperian, the university's scholar newspaper, and became a litt‚rateur for the Lincoln Courier.^[39] Onetime at the university, she prudent mathematics from and was befriended by John J. Pershing, who later became General of justness Armies and, like Cather, fitting a Pulitzer Prize for cap writing.^[40][41] She changed her combination from studying science with grandeur goal of becoming a medical doctor, instead graduating with a Ascetic of Arts in English take away 1895.^[29]: 71

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

Life and career

In 1896, Cather was hired emphasize write for a women's monthly, Home Monthly, and moved peel Pittsburgh.^[11][45] There, she wrote journalistic pieces, short stories, and poetry.^[38] A year later, after dignity magazine was sold,^[46] she became a telegraph editor and arbiter for the Pittsburgh Leader tolerate frequently contributed poetry and little fiction to The Library, in relation to local publication.^[47] In Pittsburgh, she taught Latin, algebra, and Above-board composition at Central High Educational institution for one year;^[48] she spread taught English and Latin look Allegheny High School, where she came to head the Ethically department.^[49][50]

Shortly after moving to City, Cather wrote short stories, plus publishing "Tommy, the Unsentimental" assume the Home Monthly,^[51] about nifty Nebraskan girl with a butch name who looks like neat boy and saves her father's bank business. Janis P. Burly calls this story one go in for several Cather works that "demonstrate the speciousness of rigid intimacy roles and give favorable usage to characters who undermine conventions."^[52] Cather resigned from her position at the Pittsburgh Leader curb the late spring of 1900 before relocating to Washington, D.C. that fall.^[53] In April 1902, Cather published her final attempt to the Lincoln Courier hitherto going abroad with Isabelle McClung that summer.^[53] Her first manual, a collection of poetry denominated April Twilights, was published think it over 1903.^[C] Shortly after this, enjoy 1905, Cather's first collection delightful short stories, The Troll Garden, was published. It contained varied of her most famous mythological, including "A Wagner Matinee," "The Sculptor's Funeral," and "Paul's Case."^[62]

After Cather was offered an essay position at McClure's Magazine coach in 1906, she moved to Unusual York City.^[63] Cather spent uppermost of 1907 living in Beantown, while working at McClure's, script a series of exposés approximately the religious leader Mary Baker Eddy, although freelance journalist Georgine Milmine was credited as glory author.^[64] A 1993 letter unconcealed in the Christian Science cathedral archives by Eddy biographer Gillian Gill disclosed that Cather challenging (perhaps reluctantly) written articles 2 through 14 of the 14-part series.^[65] Milmine had performed abundant amounts of research, but she had been unable to shut yourself away a manuscript independently, and McClure's employed Cather and a insufficient other editors including Burton Number. Hendrick to assist her.^[66] That biography was serialized in McClure's over the next eighteen months and then published in unqualified form as The Life out-and-out Mary Baker G. Eddy explode the History of Christian Science (attributed to author Georgina Milmine, only confirmed decades later restructuring 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 come first skillful,"^[70] Cather herself soon proverb the novel as weak build up shallow.^[71]

Cather followed Alexander's Bridge better her three novels set modern the Great Plains, which sooner or later became both popular and depreciating successes: O Pioneers! (1913),^[72]The Inexpensively of the Lark (1915),^[73] last My Ántonia (1918),^[74] which are—taken together—sometimes referred to as fallow "Prairie Trilogy."^[75][76] It is that succession of plains-based novels fit in which Cather was celebrated get on to her use of plainspoken voice about ordinary people.^[77][78]Sinclair Lewis, go allout for example, praised her work hunger for making Nebraska available to probity wider world for the prime time.^[79] After writing The Seamless Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald lamented that it was a deficit in comparison to My Ántonia.^[80]

1920s

As late as 1920, Cather became dissatisfied with the performance slant her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, which devoted an advertising budget love only $300 to My Ántonia,^[81] and refused to pay teach all the illustrations she authorised for the book from Władysław T. Benda.^[74] What's more, nobility physical quality of the books was poor.^[82] That year, she turned to the young statement house, Alfred A. Knopf, which had a reputation for orientation its authors through advertising campaigns.^[81] She also liked the appeal of its books and confidential been impressed with its demonstration of Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson.^[81] She so enjoyed their style that all bring about Knopf books of the 1920s—save for one printing of in return short story collection Youth illustrious the Bright Medusa—matched in model on their second and ensuing printings.^[83]

By this time, Cather was firmly established as a bigger American writer, receiving the Publisher Prize in 1923 for send someone away World War I-based novel, One of Ours.^[81] She followed that up with the popular Death Comes for the Archbishop up-to-date 1927, selling 86,500 copies interleave just two years,^[84] and which has been included on authority Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the twentieth century.^[81] Link of her three other novels of the decade—A Lost Lady and The Professor's House—elevated cobble together literary status dramatically. She was invited to give several cardinal lectures to the public, justifiable significant royalties, and sold picture movie rights to A Lacking Lady. Her other novel give an account of 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 a range of it later in their lives.^[85]

Despite her success, she was class subject of much criticism, very surrounding One of Ours. Come together close friend, Elizabeth Shepley Barrister, saw the novel as swell betrayal of the realities bank war, not understanding how stunt "bridge the gap between [Cather's] idealized war vision ... essential my own stark impressions call upon war as lived."^[86] Similarly, Ernest Hemingway took issue with eliminate portrayal of war, writing mark out a 1923 letter: "Wasn't [the novel's] last scene in rendering lines wonderful? Do you update where it came from? Honourableness battle scene in Birth perfect example a Nation. I identified event after episode, Catherized. Poor gal, she had to get crack up war experience somewhere."^[87]

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

1930s

By the 1930s, an increasingly thickset share of critics began commend dismiss her as overly dreaming and nostalgic, unable to clasp with contemporary issues:^[89]Granville Hicks, carry instance, charged Cather with pull in into an idealized past apply to avoid confronting the problems clamour the present.^[90][91] And it was particularly in the context garbage the hardships of the Big Depression in which her be concerned was seen as lacking common relevance.^[92] Similarly, critics—and Cather herself^[93]—were disappointed when her novel A Lost Lady was made turnoff a film; the film esoteric little resemblance to the novel.^[94][95]

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

Although Writer made her last trip attain Red Cloud in 1931 act a family gathering after collect mother's death, she stayed terminate touch with her Red Dapple friends and sent money pocket Annie Pavelka and other families during the Depression years.^[28]: 327 Extort 1932, Cather published Obscure Destinies, her final collection of petite fiction, which contained "Neighbour Rosicky," one of her most immensely regarded stories. That same season, she moved into a modern apartment on Park Avenue co-worker Edith Lewis, and during regular visit on Grand Manan, she probably began working on irregular next novel, Lucy Gayheart.^[103][E] She was elected to the Denizen Philosophical Society in 1934.^[122]

Cather receive two devastating losses in 1938.^{[123][124][125]} In June, her favorite fellow, Douglass, died of a plight attack. Cather was too doleful to attend the funeral.^[29]: 478 Connect months later, Isabelle McClung epileptic fit. Cather and McClung had flybynight together when Cather first dismounted in Pittsburgh, and while McClung eventually married the musician Jan Hambourg and moved with be involved with husband to Toronto,^[126][127] the four women remained devoted friends.^{[128][129][F]} Writer wrote that Isabelle was excellence person for whom she wrote all her books.^[132]

Final years

During depiction summer of 1940, Cather pointer Lewis went to Grand Manan for the last time, gleam Cather finished her final anecdote, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a book much darker hold tone and subject matter leave speechless her previous works.^{[29]: 483 [133]} While Sapphira is understood by readers reorganization lacking a moral sense swallow failing to evoke empathy,^[134] rendering novel was a great considerable and commercial success, with effect advance printing of 25,000 copies.^[84] It was then adopted unresponsive to the Book of the Moon Club,^[135] which bought more best 200,000 copies.^[136] Her final tale, "The Best Years",^[137] intended on account of a gift for her brother,^[138] was retrospective. It contained carbons copy or "keepsakes" from each watch her twelve published novels become peaceful the short stories in Obscure Destinies.^[139]

Although an inflamed tendon of great magnitude her hand hampered her scribble literary works, Cather managed to finish a-ok substantial part of a contemporary set in Avignon, France. She had titled it Hard Punishments and placed it in goodness 14th century during the exotic of Antipope Benedict XIV.^[28]: 371 She was elected a fellow point toward the American Academy of Humanities and Sciences in 1943.^[140] Probity same year, she executed skilful will that prohibited the revise of her letters and theatrical piece acting of her works.^[131] In 1944, she received the gold adornment for fiction from the Genealogical Institute of Arts and Writing book, a prestigious award given put on view an author's total accomplishments.^[141]

Cather was diagnosed with breast cancer explain December 1945 and underwent organized mastectomy on January 14, 1946.^{[142]: 294–295} By early 1947, her sarcoma had metastasized to her products, becoming stage IV cancer.^[142]: 296On Apr 24, 1947, Cather died model a cerebral hemorrhage at rank age of 73 in yield home at 570 Park Access in Manhattan.^[143][144] After Cather's kill, Edith Lewis destroyed the notes of Hard Punishments according lodging Cather's instructions.^[145] She is hidden at the southwest corner wear out Jaffrey, New Hampshire's Old Burial Ground,^{[146][147][148]} a place she cheeriness 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 Cumbersome Statements, 1893-1896 (1966)
• The World very last the Parish: Willa Cather's Ezines and Reviews, 1893-1902 (1970)

Personal life

Scholars disagree about Cather's sexual whittle. Some believe it impossible recall anachronistic to determine whether she had same-sex attraction,^[153][154] while nakedness disagree.^{[155][156][157]} Researcher Deborah Carlin suggests that denial of Cather life a lesbian is rooted pimple treating same-sex desire "as stop up insult to Cather and gather reputation", rather than a half-hearted historical perspective.^[158] Melissa Homestead has argued that Cather was intent to Edith Lewis, and overfull so doing, asked: "What knowledge of evidence is needed access establish this as a greek relationship? Photographs of the yoke of them in bed together? She was an integral declare of Cather's life, creatively be first personally."^[18] Beyond her own negotiations with women, Cather's reliance align male characters has been spineless to support the idea frequent her same-sex attraction.^[159][G]Harold Bloom calls her "erotically evasive in improve art" due to prevailing "societal taboos".^[163]

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

Cather's delight with Lewis began in ethics early 1900s. They lived cudgel in a series of abode in New York City unfamiliar 1908 until Cather's death comprise 1947. From 1913 to 1927, Cather and Lewis lived scoff at No. 5 Bank Street clod Greenwich Village.^[167] They moved just as the apartment was scheduled practise demolition during the construction show consideration for the Broadway–Seventh AvenueNew York Get Subway line (now the 1, ​2, and ​3 trains).^[168][169] While Lewis was elite as the literary trustee implication Cather's estate,^[55] she was watchword a long way merely a secretary for Cather's documents but an integral put a stop to of Cather's creative process.^[170]

Beginning end in 1922, Cather spent summers school the island of Grand Manan in New Brunswick, where she bought a cottage in Cast around Cove on the Bay appreciated Fundy. This is where smear short story "Before Breakfast" attempt set.^[19][171] She valued the concealment of the island and upfront not mind that her hut had neither indoor plumbing shadowy electricity. Anyone wishing to range her could do so be oblivious to telegraph or mail.^[29]: 415 In 1940, she stopped visiting Grand Manan after Canada's entrance to Earth War II, as travel was considerably more difficult; she too began a long recuperation depart from gallbladder surgery in 1942 stray restricted travel.^{[172][142]: 266–268}

A resolutely private workman, Cather destroyed many drafts, exceptional papers, and letters, asking austerity to do the same.^[173] Measure many complied, some did not.^[174] Her will restricted the competence of scholars to quote make the first move 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, accept literary acquaintances such as Architect Wilder and F. Scott Fitzgerald—was published, two years after decency death of Cather's nephew playing field second literary executor, Charles Author. Willa Cather's correspondence revealed honourableness complexity of her character gift inner world.^[175] The letters beat not disclose any intimate petty details about Cather's personal life, however they do "make clear saunter [her] primary emotional attachments were to women."^[176] The Willa Author Archive at the University break into Nebraska–Lincoln works to digitize jewels complete body of writing, inclusive of private correspondence and published drain. As of 2021, about 2,100 letters have been made without restraint available to the public, pulse addition to transcription of subtract own published writing.^[177][178]

Writing influences

Cather beloved Henry James's use of jargon and characterization.^[179] While Cather enjoyed the novels of several women—including George Eliot,^[180] the Brontës, sit Jane Austen—she regarded most platoon writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental.^[29]: 110 One contemporary censure was Sarah Orne Jewett, who became Cather's friend and mentor.^[H] Jewett advised Cather of not too things: to use female narrators in her fiction (even in spite of Cather preferred using male perspectives),^[185][186] to write about her "own country" (O Pioneers! was overenthusiastic to Jewett),^{[187][188][189]} and to record fiction that explicitly represented with one`s head in the attraction between women.^{[190][191][192][I]} Cather was also influenced by the drain of Katherine Mansfield,^[102] praising pin down an essay Mansfield's ability "to throw a luminous streak dispose of onto the shadowy realm a choice of personal relationships."^[194]

Cather's high regard edify the immigrant families forging lives and enduring hardships on rank Nebraska plains shaped much matching her fiction. The Burlington Entrepot in Red Cloud brought mosquito many strange and wonderful citizens to her small town. Little a child, she visited planter families in her area advocate returned home in "the governing unreasonable state of excitement," notion that she "had got affections another person's skin."^{[22]: 169–170} After fastidious trip to Red Cloud case 1916, Cather decided to commit to paper a novel based on goodness events in the life behoove her childhood friend Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a Bohemian girl who became the model for loftiness title character in My Ántonia.^{[74][195][196]} Cather was likewise fascinated next to the French-Canadian pioneers from Quebec who had settled in leadership Red Cloud area while she was a girl.^[197][198]

During a shortlived stopover in Quebec with Edith Lewis in 1927, Cather was inspired to write a chronicle set in that French-Canadian spring back. Lewis recalled: "From the chief moment that she looked shrink from the windows of primacy [Chateau] Frontenac [Hotel] on integrity pointed roofs and Norman outlines of the town of Quebec, Willa Cather was not exclusively stirred and charmed—she was beset by the flood of experiences, recognition, surmise it called up; by the sense of corruption extraordinary French character, isolated significant kept intact through hundreds forget about years, as if by unornamented miracle, on this great un-French continent."^{[29]: 414–15} Cather finished her contemporary Shadows on the Rock, adroit historical novel set in 17th-century Quebec, in 1931;^[199] it was later included in Life magazine's list of the 100 undone books of 1924–1944.^[200] The Land influence is found in multitudinous other Cather works, including Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and her final, unfinished new-fangled set in Avignon, Hard Punishments.^[197]

Literary style and reception

Although Cather began her writing career as a-one journalist, she made a rank between journalism, which she aphorism as being primarily informative, abstruse literature, which she saw style an art form.^[201]: 27 Cather's drudgery is often marked by—and criticized for^[202]—its nostalgic tone^{[102][203][204]} and themes drawn from memories of inclusion early years on the Inhabitant plains.^[205][206] Consequently, a sense pick up the tab place is integral to become public work: notions of land,^[207] leadership frontier,^[J] pioneering and relationships set about western landscapes are recurrent.^{[209][210][211]} Regular when her heroines were positioned in an urban environment, birth influence of place was depreciatory, and the way that indicate was displayed through room composition and furniture is evident shut in her novels like My Transitory Enemy.^[212] Though she hardly poky herself to writing exclusively turn the Midwest, Cather is all but inseparable from the Midwestern influence that she actively cultivated (even though she was not uncluttered "native" Midwesterner).^[213] While Cather go over said to have significantly at variance her literary approach in reprimand of her novels,^[214][215] this guard is not universal; some critics have charged Cather with vitality out of touch with reject times and failing to send regrets more experimental techniques in in trade writing, such as stream for consciousness.^{[201]: 36 [216][217]} At the same constantly, others have sought to make your home in Cather alongside modernists by either pointing to the extreme chattels of her apparently simple Romanticism^[218] or acknowledging her own "middle ground":

She had formed gift matured her ideas on work against before she wrote a account. She had no more argument to follow Gertrude Stein stall James Joyce, whose work she respected, than they did contact follow her. Her style solves the problems in which she was interested. She wanted follow stand midway between the newspaperwomen whose omniscient objectivity accumulate ultra fact than any character could notice and the psychological penman whose use of subjective come together of view stories distorts location reality. She developed her idea on a middle ground, election facts from experience on illustriousness basis of feeling and mistreatment presenting the experience in splendid lucid, objective style.^[219]

The English penny-a-liner A. S. Byatt has fated that with each work Author reinvented the novel form nurse investigate the changes in decency human condition over time.^[220] Exceptionally in her frontier novels, Author wrote of both the belle and terror of life.^[221] Cherish the exiled characters of h James, an author who difficult to understand a significant influence on prestige author,^[222] most of Cather's larger characters live as exiled immigrants,^[221] identifying with the immigrants' "sense of homelessness and exile" pursuing her own feelings of escapee living on the frontier. Ingenuity is through their engagement narrow their environment that they bring in their community.^[223]Susan J. Rosowski wrote that Cather was perhaps grandeur first to grant immigrants simple respectable position in American literature.^[224]

Legacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2023, the U.S. state of Nebraska donated uncut bronze sculpture of Cather vulgar Littleton Alston to the Public Statuary Hall Collection. The solve is installed in the In partnership States Capitol's Capitol Visitors Heart, in Washington, D.C.^[231]

Notes

References