Willa Cather

The family left Virginia in 1883 because Charles Cather's parents wanted farmland and because tuberculosis was going through the Back Creek valley. Willa was nine. Her father lasted 18 months at farming, then moved everyone into Red Cloud and sold real estate and insurance, and the children went to school for the first time. She read her way through the library of a Jewish couple in town who gave her the run of it, rode along on house calls with the local doctor, decided to become a surgeon, and for a while signed herself William. At the University of Nebraska an essay she had written on Thomas Carlyle turned up in the Nebraska State Journal without her knowledge. After that she wrote columns for a dollar each.

Ten years in Pittsburgh paid for the apprenticeship: editing Home Monthly, running telegraph copy at the Pittsburgh Leader, teaching Latin and English in the high schools. She moved to McClure's Magazine in 1906 and wrote most of a 14-part serial on Mary Baker Eddy that ran under another writer's name, a fact not settled until a letter surfaced in Christian Science archives decades later. Sarah Orne Jewett told her to write about her own country, and she did — O Pioneers! in 1913, dedicated to Jewett, then The Song of the Lark and My Antonia. One of Ours took the Pulitzer in 1923. Death Comes for the Archbishop followed in 1927, and Shadows on the Rock, the most widely read novel in America the year it appeared, in 1931.

The 1930s went badly. Younger critics wrote her off as a nostalgist with nothing to say about the Depression, Granville Hicks charging her with escaping into an idealized past, and Hemingway had already told a correspondent in 1923 that the battle scenes in her Pulitzer novel came out of The Birth of a Nation — poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere. Her books went on selling anyway. Then in June 1938 her favorite brother, Douglass, died of a heart attack and she was too stricken to attend the funeral. Four months later Isabelle McClung died. Cather had written her hundreds of letters across 40 years and said Isabelle was the person she wrote all her books for. The husband returned the letters. Almost all of them were destroyed.

She died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 24, 1947, at her apartment on Park Avenue, 16 months after a breast cancer diagnosis and a mastectomy, with the disease by then in her liver. Edith Lewis, who had lived with her for 39 years, destroyed the unfinished Avignon novel as instructed and was buried beside her in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, some 25 years later. The 1943 will forbade publication of her letters and any dramatization of her work. It held until 2013, when 566 letters appeared and made plain that her strongest attachments were to women — which scholars have argued about ever since, some holding the modern categories anachronistic. In 2023 Nebraska sent her likeness to the Capitol.

Willa Cather's life against the full span of the corpus.

• O Pioneers! book
  Dedicated to Sarah Orne Jewett, who told her to write her own country 1913
• The Song of the Lark book
  A Colorado girl becomes an opera singer 1915
• My Antonia book
  Fitzgerald thought it better than The Great Gatsby 1918
• One of Ours book
  The Pulitzer novel, and the one Hemingway mocked 1922
• Death Comes for the Archbishop book
  New Mexico, and her most durable book with critics 1927
• Sapphira and the Slave Girl book
  Her last novel, set in the Virginia she had left at nine 1940

• 1883 aged ~10 The family moves from Virginia to Webster County, Nebraska She was nine. Her father gave up farming after 18 months and opened an office in Red Cloud.
• 1891 aged ~18 Her essay on Carlyle is printed in the Nebraska State Journal without her knowing
• 1896 aged ~23 Moves to Pittsburgh to edit Home Monthly Ten years of magazines, newspapers and high-school teaching followed.
• 1906 aged ~33 Joins McClure's Magazine in New York She wrote most of the magazine's 14-part series on Mary Baker Eddy under another name.
• 1913 aged ~40 Publishes O Pioneers! and finds her subject
• 1923 aged ~50 Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours
• 1938 aged ~65 Loses her brother Douglass in June and Isabelle McClung in October Nearly all her letters to McClung were destroyed after they were returned to her.
• 1943 aged ~70 Executes a will barring publication of her letters and any dramatization
• April 24, 1947 aged 73 Dies of a cerebral hemorrhage at 73 Breast cancer diagnosed in December 1945 had reached stage IV by early 1947.

• Mary Baker Eddy 1821–1910
  Founder of Christian Science and a major female religious leader and publisher. wrote the serial about
• Ernest Hemingway 1899–1961
  Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose spare prose style defined 20th-century American fiction. mocked by
• Sinclair Lewis 1885–1951
  First American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, whose satirical novels critiqued American capitalism. championed by
• F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896–1940
  Novelist who captured the Jazz Age in The Great Gatsby, the defining novel of the American Dream. admired by
• John J. Pershing 1860–1948
  Commander of the American Expeditionary Forces who built and led the U.S. Army in World War I. classmate at Nebraska