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 American
novelist noted for her novels about immigrants struggling to make
a living in the Midwest during the late 1800s. Various critics have
placed Cather among feminist writers, antifeminist writers, and
even lesbian writers. She authored 12 novels, the most popular of
which include MY ÀNTONIA (1918), O PIONEERS! (1913), THE SONG OF
THE LARK (1915), and DEATH COMES TO ARCHBISHOP (1927). In her works
Cather created strong female characters who have the courage and
vision to face all the obstacles in their difficult lives.
"She was a good artists, and all true art is provincial in
the most realistic sense: of the very time and place of its making,
out of human beings who are so particularly limited by their situation,
whose faces and names are real and whose lives begin each one
at an individual unique centreIndeed, Willa Cather was as provincial
as Hawthorne or Flaubert or Turgenev, as little concerned with
aesthetics and as much with morals as Tolstoy, as obstinately
reserved as Melville. In fact she always reminds me of very good
literary company, of the particularly admirable masters who formed
her youthful tastes, her thinking and feeling."
( Katherine Anne Porter in Lesbian and Bisexual Fiction Writers,
ed. by H. Bloom, 1997)
Willa Cather was born in Back Creek Valley (now Gore), near Winchester,
Virginia. At the age of nine she moved with her family to a farm
near Red Clour, in the Nebraska settler country. There she grew
up among the immigrants from Europe, most of them coming from Scandinavia,
who were establishing homesteads on the Great Plains. This milieu,
wide open spaces with its people forms the background for half of
Cather's novels and many short stories depicting the frontier life
on the American plains.
The new ranch was not a success, and in 1884 the family moved to
the small railroad town of Red Cloud, where Cather's father opened
an insurance business. Cather was educated at home, and later she
attended Red Cloud High School. From an early age, Cather was troubled
by her sexual identity. She preferred to dress in men's clothing
and as a teenager she began signing her name "William Cather, Jr."
and later Dr. Will." Cather also was active in community theatre
productions and often took male roles.
In 1890 Cather moved to Lincoln to escape the conservatism of the
small town - she never married but in later life in New York she
found lifelong companion, Edith Lewis. In a letter to Louise Pound,
a close college friend, Cather confessed that she thought it unfair
that feminine friendships were `unnatural'. Cather studied at Latin
School (1891-92), and the University of Nebraska (1891-95). While
still an undergraduate she began publishing short stories and she
also wrote a weekly column for the Nebraska State Journal.
 After
receiving her Cather A.B. in 1895 lived in Pittsburg with Isabelle
McClung. She spent 10 years there, first as a newspaper- woman and
then as a high-school teacher of English and Latin. Cather worked
as an editorial staff member for Home Monthly and telegraph
editor and theatre critic for Daily Leader. In 1897-1901
she was Latin and English teacher at Central High School and then
English teacher at Allegheny High School. In 1903 Cather made her
debut as a writer with APRIL TWILIGHTS, her only volume of poetry.
"There are only two or three human stories, and they go on
repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened
before."
(from O Pioneers!, 1913)
McClung married in 1915, but Cather had already met Edith Lewis
while travelling to New York during this period. At the age of 32
Cather moved to New York to live with Lewis and to edit McClure's
Magazine. Her first novel, ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE, appeared in 1912,
and was followed a year later O Pioneers!. Cather was 40
when the book appeared. It was an archetypal success story of a
daughter of Swedish immigrant farmers, Alexandra Bergson, who arrives
on the wind-blasted prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, and grows up to
make it a prosperous farm. Cather resigned in 1912 from McClure's,
began writing full-time, and travelled to the Southwest, returning
there a few years later. The theme of a journey appeared in her
novel, The Song of the Lark, which was partly set in Walnut
Canyon, Arizona, and took the form of the opera singer Thea Kronberg's
pursuit of artistic excellence.
My Àntonia, another story of Nebraska, celebrated the land
and the immigrant pioneers, and linked the enduring figure of Àntonia
to the lifeforce itself. The book consists of the loosely-structured
memories of Jim Burden, who recounts tales of his Nebraska farm
upbringing, and especially of the beautiful immigrant girl from
Bohemia, Ántonia Shimerda, whom he loves with a pure innocence.
My Àntonia is among Cather's finest work, but later critics
have also pointed out that though Cather did not deal specifically
with lesbianism, normal sex stands barred from her fictional world
and her male characters often have female attitudes and interests.
Jim Burden grows up in the novel with an intuitive fear of sex and
only in fantasy he allows a half-nude woman to smother him with
kisses. The original of Ántonia was Annie Sadilek Pavelka, whom
Cather had met in childhood and with whom he maintained a lifelong
friendship: "Of the people who intrested me most as a child was
the Bohemian hired girl of one of our neighbors, who was so good
to me... Annie fascinated me and I always had it in mind to write
a story about her." (from Lesbian and Bisexual Fiction Writers)
In 1922 Cather won the Pulizer Prize
for her novel ONE OF OURS, which depicted a boy from the Western
plains, who leaves home to fight in World War I and is killed during
in France. Ernest Hemingway, in a letter to critic Edmund Wilson,
expressed disdain at Cather's having received the prize, remarking
that she must have drawn the battlefield scene from the film Birth
of a Nation.
 In
the years following WW I Cather became gravely distressed by the
loss of spiritual values that accompanied the growth of materialism
and technology in the 20th-century. Her judgement of contemporary
society was seen in A LOST LADY (1923), depicting the conflict between
heroic builders of the West and cruel men of the present, and THE
PROFESSOR'S HOUSE (1925), presenting a conflict between the middle-aged
disillusion of Professor St Peter with his memories of his favourite
student, who had discovered ancient Indian civilization in New Mexico.
Cather's twelve novels and short fiction fall into three groups:
tales influenced by Henry James, works dealing with immigrant life
in the West, and historical novels, such as DEATH COMES FOR THE
ARCHBISHOP (1927). The novel is based on the lives of Bishop Jean
Babtiste L'Amy and his vicar Father Joseph Machebeauf, who organize
the new Roman Catholic diocese of New Mexico. The novel focused
on Bishop Jean Latour's and vicar Father Joseph Vaillant's inner
conflicts, their relationship with the land and the tension between
Old World values and life in the New World. Also Cather's own world
view was changing. She joined the Episcopalian Church and demonstrated
her growing distaste for the modern values.
Cather published little in her last years. She developed a close
friendship with Yehudi Menuhin and his sisters. In NOT UNDER FORTY
(1936) Cather recorded her own debt as writer to Sarah Orne Jewett
(1849-1909), who wrote about life in New England. Cather's last
novel, SAPPHIRA AND THE SLAVE (1940), looks at the relationships
between African-American women, and mothers and daughters. It is
her only novel which was set in the Virginia of her grandmother.
Cather died on April 24, 1947.
"Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining
of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful
is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult
it is."
(from The Song of the Lark, 1915)
NOTE: 'One of the most charming places in New York' wrote
Willa Cather about Greenwich Village, where she lived like Tom
Paine, James Fennimore Cooper, William Jennings Bryant, Edgar
Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood
Anderson, e.e. cummings, John Dos Passos, Floyd Dell, Marianne
Moore, Eugene O'Neill, and many other writers and artists, especially
radical or experimental. In the 1910s 'the house of genius' near
Washington Square Park had as inhabitants Cather, Dreiser, O.Henry,
and Crane.
For further reading: Willa Cather: Queering America by
Marilee Lindemann (1999); The Stuff of Our Forebears by Joyce
McDonald (1998); Cather Studies, ed. by Susan J. Rosowski (1996);
Willa Cather by E. Wagenknecht (1994); A Reader's Guide to the
Short Stories of Willa Cather, ed. by Everett Emerson (1994);
A Life Saved Up by Hermione Lee (1989); Willa Cather: A Literary
Life by J. Woodress (1987); Willa Cather in Person by Brent L.
Bohlke et al (1987); Willa Cather by Sharon O'Brien (1987); Willa
Cather by Philip Gerber (1975, rev. ed. 1995); The Landscape and
the Looking Glass by J.H. Randall (1960): Willa Cather and Her
Critics ed. by J. Schroeter (1967); Willa Cather: A Critical Biography
by E.K. Brown (1953).
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