The Modern Novel

Biography

Cather was actually born in Virginia (near Winchester) in 1873 but moved to the Nebraska Divide with her family when she was nine years old. She soon adapted to the prairie landscape, which would feature so strongly in her writings. When a teenager she became interested in science; she also cut her hair short and adopted the name of William Cather. She attended the University of Nebraska, where she started writing. She started getting published – essays, short stories and poems. After expressing her love for a woman friend, she started to let her hair grow and abandoned masculine dress. After graduation, she stayed in Nebraska and continued her writing. However, when she was refused a teaching position, she moved to Pittsburgh, where she got a job as editor of a women’s magazine. When the magazine changed hands, she left her post but continued to write for the magazine as well as for other magazines.

She continued to have some success in writing criticism, short stories and plays. She went to work for McClure’s Magazine and eventually became managing editor. Her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, published as Alexander’s Masquerade appeared in McClure’s in 1912 and was followed by O Pioneers! the next year. She continued to publish novels, generally to critical and commercial acclaim, (though this was sometimes muted by attacks on her for being too romantic and escapist) despite suffering from a variety of illnesses throughout her life. She died in 1947.

Her work is strongly influenced by the landscape of Nebraska where she grew up. Not only is the landscape an integral part of her writing, her main characters are clearly moulded by it. These characters are generally tough, hardened by the difficult conditions under which they have grown up, pioneers. But her main characters have more than this; they have an indomitable spirit which enables them to stand above the people around them, whether as an artist like Thea Kronborg or as a woman of spirit who can rise above the ordinariness around her like Alexandra Bergson or Ántonia Shimerda.

Was Cather a Lesbian? It is now fashionable to say so and she has been adopted by the gay movement. She clearly had strong feelings for other women such as Isabelle McClung and Louise Pound and lived with Edith Lewis for a long time. Though she did have male friends, she is not known to have had any romantic attachments with men. Others have said that she sacrificed marriage and family for her art and there is some evidence for that, too. Whatever her sexual inclinations, she remains one of the United States’s foremost writers.

Books about Willa Cather

Mildred R. Bennett: The World of Willa Cather
Barbara Bonham: Willa Cather
E. K Brown: Willa Cather, a Critical Biography
Marion Marsh: Willa Cather, the Woman and her Works
Philip L. Brown Gerber: Willa Cather
Hermione Lee: Willa Cather: Double Lives
Phyllis C. Robinson: Willa, the Life of Willa Cather
Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant: Willa Cather: A Memoir
Susie Thomas: Willa Cather (Women Writers series)
Laura Winters: Willa Cather: Landscape and Exile
James Woodress: Willa Cather: A Literary Life (the standard biography)

Other links

Willa Cather
Willa Cather
Willa Cather
Willa Cather
American pastoral (article by A S Byatt on Willa Cather)
The Willa Cather Archive
The Willa Cather Foundation
LOST! A Lady. FOUND! An Artist (article on Cather by Malcolm Cowley from 1926)
And Death Comes for Willa Cather, Famous Author (Obituary from Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, 25 April 1947)