Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) was born in Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia, the first of seven children born to Charles Fetigue Cather and Mary Virginia Boak. In 1883 the Cathers joined other family members on farmland near Red Cloud, Nebraska and then settled permanently in the booming frontier town eighteen months later. There Charles Cather opened a land development and insurance business and the children attended school for the first time. Cather broadened her education riding across the plains to visit nearby pioneer families, joining the local doctor as he made his rounds by buggy, and studying Latin and Greek with an educated neighbor. When she was sixteen, Willa Cather moved alone to Lincoln, a hundred-fifty miles east of Red Cloud, to attend the University of Nebraska, got her first job as a drama critic for the Nebraska State Journal in 1893, and graduated in 1895.
In 1896, Cather took a job in Pittsburgh editing the Home Monthly magazine. In 1901 she moved in with her friend, Isabelle McClung, to live in the McClung family home in the wealthy Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh where she focused on writing poetry and short fiction. That same year she began teaching and became head of the English department at Allegheny High in 1903, the same year she met Edith Lewis during a summer visit to Lincoln, Nebraska. Lewis, a native Nebraskan and recent graduate of Smith College, was about to leave her teaching position in Lincoln to find an editorial job in New York City. In 1906 Cather landed her own editorial job in New York, joining the staff at McClure’s Magazine where Lewis soon joined her and, by 1907, the two were also sharing an apartment together in Greenwich Village. They would continue to live together until Cather’s death on April 13, 1947.
Cather gave up journalism and published her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, in 1912. With the publication of O Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1914), in which she explored pioneer life in Nebraska, she established her reputation as a novelist and in 1923 she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours. Introduced only to these early novels, readers may regard Cather as merely a lyrical eulogist for her own childhood years in Nebraska. But her novels range well beyond the Great Plains to dwell on locations as varied as Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, New York, Virginia, Canada, and France, and they develop plots and characters drawn not only from her own but from the lives of people she grew to know through interviews or research: Olive Fremstad, for instance, the great Metropolitan Opera singer for Song of the Lark (1915), and Jean-Baptiste Lamy, who built the Saint Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for one of her greatest novels, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).
WORKS BY WILLA CATHER
POETRY
April Twilights (1903)
NOVELS
Alexander’s Bridge (1912)
O Pioneers! (1913)
The Song of the Lark (1915)
My Antonia (1918)
One of Ours (1922)
A Lost Lady (1923)
The Professor’s House (1925)
My Mortal Enemy (1926)
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
Shadows on the Rock (1931)
Lucy Gayheart (1935)
Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940)
SHORT STORIES
The Troll Garden (1905)
Youth and the Bright Medusa ((1920)
Obscure Destinies (1932)
The Old Beauty and Others (1948)
Five Stories (1956)
ESSAYS
Not Under Forty (1936)
Willa Cather: On Writing (1956)
BIOGRAPHY
The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1909)
(Willa Cather and Georgine Milmine)
My Autobiography (1914)
(Samuel S. McClure, in collaboration with Willa Cather)
