Willa Cather

American · 1873 to 1947

Born Wilella Sibert Cather on December 7, 1873, on her maternal grandmother's farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia, she moved with her family to a sod-and-clapboard homestead in Webster County, Nebraska, at the age of nine. The shock of the empty grasslands, where she said she felt as if she had been erased and re-drawn, became the country of her fiction. The family settled in the small prairie town of Red Cloud, where she ran wild on neighbouring farms among Bohemian, Swedish, and Russian immigrants who became the originals of Ántonia Shimerda, Alexandra Bergson, and Anton Rosicky. She cut her hair, called herself William, and went up to the University of Nebraska in 1890. After ten years editing in Pittsburgh and teaching high school Latin, she joined the muckraking McClure's Magazine in 1906 and rose to managing editor before Sarah Orne Jewett's advice released her to fiction: write about your own country. O Pioneers! (1913) was the result. My Ántonia (1918) followed, a novel of pioneer girlhood narrated by a man who had known her, and One of Ours (1922) won the Pulitzer Prize. She moved to Knopf, settled in Greenwich Village with her partner of nearly forty years, the editor Edith Lewis, and spent her summers on Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy. Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), her hushed, candle-lit New Mexican chronicle, she considered her finest book. She died of a cerebral haemorrhage in Manhattan on April 24, 1947, at seventy-three. Cather and Lewis are buried together in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.