Biography of Willa Cather

     Willa Cather was born on December 7, 1873 in Back Creek Valley which is a small farming community close to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia.  Her father, Charles Cather, was a deputy sheriff and her mother was Mary Virginia Boak Cather.  Willa was the oldest child in her family.  The Cather family moved to Webster County, Nebraska to join Willa’s grandparents William and Caroline and her uncle George in 1883.  At this time the family consisted of Willa’s two brothers Roscoe and Douglass, a sister named Jessica and her grandmother Rachel Boak who all lived with them.  They moved to Red Cloud, a nearby railroad town, a year later where her father opened a loan and insurance office.  The Cather family never became wealthy or powerful.  Willa blamed their lack of financial success to her father because he placed intellectual and spiritual matters over the business.  Willa’s mother was a proud woman who was mostly concerned with fashion and turning Willa into “a lady.”  Willa resisted the norms for girls and she cut her hair short and wore trousers.  Many characters that are used in her writings are inspired by people that she me in her youth at some point in time.  In 1890, Willa graduated from Red Cloud High School.  Soon after her graduation she moved to the state capitol in Lincoln in order to study for the entrance at the University of Nebraska.  Willa was actually interested in the study of medicine because while in Red Cloud she had spent time and learned from a local doctor, and she dreamed of becoming a physician.  One of Willa’s stories from a writing class got published and then she discovered her desire for writing.  While in college, Willa spent time editing the school magazine and publishing articles and play reviews in the local papers.  She published her short story ‘Peter’ in a Boston magazine in 1892.  She graduated from college in 1895 and returned to Red Cloud until she was offered a position editing Home Monthly in Pittsburgh.  She wrote short storied to fill it pages while she was editing the magazine.  She worked as a high school English teacher between 1901 and 1906.  During the time that she was a teacher she wrote the stories that would be published in her first collection called the Troll Garden (1905).  These short stories brought her to the attention of S.S. McClure who was the owner of the most widely read magazines of the day.  Cather then moved to New York to join McClure’s Magazine in 1906 originally as a member of the staff and finally as its managing editor.  Sara Orne Jewett inspired Cather to write about Nebraska.  Willa left McClure’s Magazine in 1912 and began writing on her own.  In 1912, she published ‘Alexander’s Bridge’ and she visited the Southwest where she became very interested by the Anasazi cliff dwellings.  ‘O Pioneers’ was published in 1913 and in 1917 she wrote ‘My Antonia’ while she lived in New Hampshire.  She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her story ‘One of Ours’ and in that same year her modernist book ‘A Lost Lady’ was published.  Her novels up to this point focused on the devastation of small-town life and the death of the pioneering tradition.  Willa was possibly overwhelmed by so much success that she suffered a period of despair which was reflected in the darker tones of the novels that were written during this period.  Regardless of her problems, Willa wrote some of her greatest novels during this period.  Many of Cather’s stories are written with deeply-held beliefs and values.  Some values that Cather had was respect for art, history, and splendor and circumstance of organized Catholic and Episcopalian religion.  She thought that people and civilizations who live in agreement with their natural environments are, and should be, sources of inspiration.  Cather criticized greed and the beginning of modern mass culture which she believed reduced human intellectual achievement and spoiled public taste.  Cather was blessed with widespread popular success and astonishing critical success early in her career.  All of her books were viewed with widespread praise and admiration.  In the 1930s this pattern began to change because of the Marxist Criticism.  The Marxist critics states that Cather didn’t understand or show any concern for modern issues.  They made fun of the romanticism which inspired her stories.  These years were very difficult for Cather because of the death of her mother, brothers and her best friend Isabelle McClung.  Even though she had some difficult years she still continued writing actively publishing novels and short stories until her death on April 24, 1947.  She ordered for all her letters to be burned at the time of her death.  Thousands of her letters escaped destruction but her will prevented them for their publication.  Her body was buried in New Hampshire.  In Red Cloud, the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Foundation was created to honor her memory.                                                                                  

Works Cited

"Biography of Willa Cather | List of Works, Study Guides & Essays | GradeSaver." Study Guides & Essay Editing | GradeSaver. Web. 01 Mar. 2011. http://www.gradesaver.com/author/willa-cather/.

Norris, Kathleen. "Willa Cather - About Willa Cather | American Masters | PBS." PBS: Public Broadcasting Service. 7 Sept. 2005. Web. 01 Mar. 2011. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/willa-cather/about-willa-cather/549/.