Born in Back Creek, Virginia in 1873, Willa Cather spent the first nine years of her life in Virginia before moving to Nebraska with her family. Initially Willa had trouble adjusting to her new life on the prairie. She felt an “erasure of personality” amidst the all encompassing land. She described the move in an interview: “I was little and homesick and lonely… so the country and I had it out together and by the end of the first autumn the shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion that I have never been able to shake. It has been the happiness and curse of my life.”
Willa attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, her classmates remembered her as one of the most colorful personalities on campus; intelligent, outspoken, talented, even mannish in her opinions and dress. While a student she not only became the managing editor of the student newspaper, The Hesperian, but also become a theater critic and columnist for the Nebraska State Journal as well as the Lincoln Courier.
Her experience in journalism and criticism took her to Pittsburgh, where she worked first for Home Monthly and then for the Pittsburgh Leader. Between 1901 and 1906, Willa took a break from journalism to teach English in local high schools and write. During this time she had numerous short stories published in magazines, and traveled abroad for the first time with companion Isabell McClung, who encouraged Willa's creative streak. In 1903 Willa met Edith Lewis, who would become her lifelong companion and she published April Twilights, a book of verse, which was followed in 1905 by The Troll Garden, her first collection of short stories, published by S. S. McClure, the editor of McClure's Magazine, the most widely circulated general monthly in the nation. In 1906 she moved to New York City to join McClure's staff and by 1908 she was promoted to managing editor.
In 1911, at age 37, Willa left McClure's to begin writing full time. In 1912 she moved in with companion Edith Lewis, with whom she lived until her death in 1947, and published her first novel, Alexander Bridge, which she later dismissed as imitative of Edith Wharton and Henry James. Her friend and mentor Sarah Orne Jewett encouraged Willa to develop her own voice, and in 1913 she delivered, publishing O Pioneers! a novel that celebrates the pioneering spirit of Swedish farmers on the plains of Nebraska. Cather placed her “shaggy grass country” at the center of the novel, allowing the land to provide the structure of the book. Reviewers were enthusiastic about the novel, recognizing a new voice in American letters. She followed this with The Song of the Lark (1915) and My Ántonia (1918), both novels are epic treatments of heroic immigrant women. She went on to write eight more novels and three more collections of short stories.
Willa received the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours. She was given honorary degrees from Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, and Smith College, among others. When novelist Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, he paid homage to Willa Cather by saying that she should have won the honor. In 1933 Willa was awarded France's Prix Femina Américaine for her depiction of French culture within North America. Her writing earned her the cover of Time Magazine as well as the gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Cather wrote, “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” Her ability to tap into these fundamental human stories is what makes Willa Cather's writing as powerful today as it was in the early twentieth century.
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