Willa Sibert Cather (born Wilella Sibert Cather; December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) was an American writer known for her books about life on the Great Plains. Some of her famous works include O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she received the Pulitzer Prize for her novel One of Ours, which is set during World War I.

When Willa was nine years old, her family moved from Virginia to Webster County, Nebraska. Later, they settled as homesteaders in Red Cloud, Nebraska. After finishing college at the University of Nebraska, Cather lived in Pittsburgh for 10 years. There, she worked as a magazine editor and taught high school English. At age 33, she moved to New York City, where she lived most of her life. She also traveled often and spent time at her summer home on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. For the last 39 years of her life, she lived with her domestic partner, Edith Lewis. Cather was diagnosed with breast cancer and died from a brain hemorrhage. She and Lewis are buried together in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

Cather became well-known for writing about the lives of people who settled on the frontier, especially those who moved west in the 19th century, many of whom were European immigrants. Her stories often explore themes such as longing for the past and feeling disconnected from home. In her books, the setting—such as landscapes and homes—plays a key role. These places influence the characters’ lives and help them find a sense of belonging.

Early life and education

Willa Cather was born in 1873 on her grandmother’s farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia. Her father, Charles Fectigue Cather, came from a family originally from Wales. The family name Cather is based on Cadair Idris, a mountain in the Gwynedd region of Wales. Her mother, Mary Virginia Boak, was a former teacher. When Willa was one year old, the family moved to Willow Shade, a home in the Greek Revival style that covered 130 acres near Winchester. This home was given to them by her paternal grandparents.

Mary Cather had six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass, Jessica, James, John, and Elsie. Willa was closer to her brothers than to her sisters. According to biographer Hermione Lee, Willa "seems not to have liked very much" her sisters.

At the request of Charles Cather’s parents, the family moved to Nebraska in 1883 when Willa was nine years old. Farming interested Charles’s father, and the family also wanted to avoid the spread of tuberculosis in Virginia. Willa’s father tried farming for 18 months before moving the family to Red Cloud, a town where he started a real estate and insurance business. The children attended school for the first time there. Some of Cather’s earliest writing was published in the Red Cloud Chief, the local newspaper. She also read widely, becoming friends with a Jewish couple, the Wieners, who allowed her to use their large library in Red Cloud. During this time, she visited patients with the local doctor and decided to become a surgeon. For a short time, she used the name William, but she later changed it to "Willa."

After graduating from Red Cloud High School in 1890 at age 16, Cather moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, to attend the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In her first year, an essay she wrote about Thomas Carlyle was published in the Nebraska State Journal without her knowledge. Later, she began writing for the newspaper for one dollar per column, saying her writing had "a kind of hypnotic effect" on her, which motivated her to continue. She became a regular contributor to the Journal. She also worked as the main editor of The Hesperian, the university’s student newspaper, and wrote for the Lincoln Courier.

While in college, she studied mathematics with her friend John J. Pershing, who later became General of the Armies and, like Cather, won a Pulitzer Prize for writing. Although she originally planned to study science to become a doctor, she changed her focus and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1895.

Cather’s time in Nebraska, a state still considered a frontier, shaped her deeply. She was inspired by the dramatic weather, the wide open prairie, and the diverse cultures of the area’s immigrant and Native American communities.

Life and career

In 1896, Willa Cather accepted a writing job with Home Monthly, a women's magazine, and moved to Pittsburgh. There, she wrote journalistic pieces, short stories, and poetry. When the magazine was sold a year later, she became a telegraph editor and critic for the Pittsburgh Leader and often contributed poetry and short fiction to The Library, another local publication. She also taught Latin, algebra, and English composition at Pittsburgh's Central High School for one year. Later, she taught English and Latin at Allegheny High School, where she became the head of the English department.

Shortly after moving to Pittsburgh, Cather began publishing short stories in Home Monthly, including "Tommy, the Unsentimental," about a girl with a masculine name who saves her father's banking business. Janis P. Stout, in Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World (2000), notes that this story, along with others by Cather, shows how strict rules about gender roles are not always true and gives positive attention to characters who challenge these rules.

Cather left her job at the Pittsburgh Leader in the late spring of 1900 and moved to Washington, D.C., that fall. In April 1902, she published her final article for the Lincoln Courier before traveling abroad with Isabelle McClung that summer. Her first book, a poetry collection titled April Twilights, was published in 1903. In 1905, she released her first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden, which included famous works like "A Wagner Matinee," "The Sculptor's Funeral," and "Paul's Case."

In 1906, Cather accepted an editorial position at McClure's Magazine and moved to New York City. While working there, she spent most of 1907 in Boston, writing a series of articles about Mary Baker Eddy, a religious leader. Although the articles were credited to Georgine Milmine, a 1993 letter found in Christian Science church archives revealed that Cather had written most of the 14-part series. Milmine did the research but could not complete the manuscript alone, so McClure's hired Cather and others to help. The series was published in McClure's over 18 months and later released as a book titled The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science, credited only to Milmine.

McClure's also published Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912). Most reviews were positive, including The Atlantic, which praised her writing as "deft and skillful." However, Cather later felt the novel was weak and shallow.

She followed Alexander's Bridge with three novels set in the Great Plains: O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). Together, they are known as her "Prairie Trilogy." These books used simple language to describe everyday people and were praised for making Nebraska more familiar to readers. Sinclair Lewis, for example, said Cather helped make Nebraska known to the world. After writing The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald said his book was not as good as My Ántonia.

By 1920, Cather was unhappy with her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, which spent only $300 on advertising for My Ántonia, refused to pay for illustrations she had commissioned, and produced a poorly made book. She then moved to Alfred A. Knopf, a publishing house known for supporting its authors with advertising. She liked the design of Knopf's books, especially its edition of Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson. From the 1920s onward, most of her Knopf books matched its design on later printings.

Cather became a major American writer, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her World War I novel One of Ours. She later wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), which sold 86,500 copies in two years and was listed in the Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century. Two other novels from the 1920s, A Lost Lady and The Professor's House, greatly improved her reputation. She gave many public lectures, earned high royalties, and sold the movie rights to A Lost Lady. However, her novel My Mortal Enemy (1926) received little praise, and she and her life partner, Edith Lewis, rarely mentioned it later.

Despite her success, Cather faced criticism, especially about One of Ours. Her friend Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant thought the novel ignored the harsh realities of war. Ernest Hemingway also criticized her portrayal of war, saying parts of the novel resembled scenes from The Birth of a Nation, a film about the Civil War.

In 1929, Cather was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

By the 1930s, some critics began to say her work was too romantic and nostalgic, avoiding modern issues. Granville Hicks, for example, said she escaped into an idealized past instead of facing current problems. Her novel A Lost Lady was also criticized when it was made into a film, as the movie had little to do with the book.

Cather's conservative political views, which appealed to critics like H.L. Mencken, Randolph Bourne, and Carl Van Doren, made her less popular with younger, left-leaning critics like Edmund Wilson. Despite this, her books remained popular. In 1931, Shadows on the Rock was the most widely read novel in the United States, and Lucy Gayheart became a bestseller in 1935.

Although Cather visited Red Cloud, Nebraska, in 1931 for a family gathering after her mother's death, she stayed in touch with friends there and sent money to families during the Great Depression. In 1932, she published Obscure Destinies, her final short story collection, which included "Neighbour Rosicky," one of her most admired stories. That summer, she moved to a new apartment on Park Avenue with Edith Lewis. During a visit to Grand Manan, she likely began working on Lucy Gayheart. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1934.

In 1938, Cather suffered two major losses. Her favorite brother, Douglass, died of a heart attack in June, and she was too sad to attend his funeral. Four months later, Isabelle McClung, who had lived with Cather in Pittsburgh, also died.

Writing influences

Willa Cather admired the way Henry James used language and created characters. She enjoyed reading novels by several women, including George Eliot, the Brontës, and Jane Austen, but she did not respect most female writers, believing their work was too emotional. An exception was Sarah Orne Jewett, who became Cather’s friend and teacher. Jewett advised Cather to use female narrators in her stories (even though Cather usually used male characters), to write about her "own country" (the novel O Pioneers! was dedicated to Jewett), and to include stories about romantic feelings between women. Cather also admired Katherine Mansfield, praising her ability to clearly show the hidden parts of personal relationships in her writing.

Cather’s respect for immigrant families who worked hard and faced challenges on the Nebraska plains influenced much of her writing. In her hometown of Red Cloud, the Burlington Depot brought many people from different places. As a child, Cather visited immigrant homes and returned home very excited, saying she felt she "had got inside another person's skin." After visiting Red Cloud in 1916, Cather decided to write a novel based on the life of her childhood friend Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a Bohemian girl who inspired the main character in My Ántonia. Cather was also interested in French-Canadian pioneers from Quebec who lived in the Red Cloud area during her childhood.

In 1927, during a short visit to Quebec with her friend Edith Lewis, Cather was inspired to write a novel set in that city. Lewis remembered that when Cather saw the rooftops and buildings of Quebec from the Frontenac Hotel, she felt a strong connection to the past, describing the town as a place with a unique French identity that had remained unchanged for centuries. Cather finished her novel Shadows on the Rock, which is set in 17th-century Quebec, in 1931. The book was later listed by Life magazine as one of the 100 outstanding books from 1924–1944. The French influence also appears in other Cather works, such as Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and her final, unfinished novel Hard Punishments, which is set in Avignon.

Literary style and reception

Willa Cather began her writing career as a journalist, but she believed journalism and literature were different. She saw journalism as a way to share facts, while literature was an art form. Cather’s writing often includes—and is sometimes criticized for—its longing for the past and themes based on her early life on the American plains. Because of this, the setting of her stories is very important. Ideas about land, the frontier, and life on the western plains often appear in her work. Even when her characters live in cities, the setting still plays a key role. For example, in her novel My Mortal Enemy, the way rooms are arranged and furniture is placed shows how setting influences the story.

Although Cather did not write only about the Midwest, she is closely linked to the region’s identity, which she helped shape, even though she was not born there. Some critics say she changed her writing style in each of her novels, but others believe she did not keep up with new writing techniques, like stream of consciousness. At the same time, other critics compare her to modernist writers. They note that her simple Romantic style had strong effects or that she created a unique middle ground in her writing.

Cather believed her writing style solved the problems she cared about. She wanted to find a balance between journalists, who focus on facts, and psychological novelists, who focus on characters’ feelings. She chose facts based on emotions and presented them clearly and objectively.

The English writer A. S. Byatt said Cather changed how novels were written to explore how people change over time. In her frontier stories, Cather showed both the beauty and danger of life. Like characters in the works of Henry James, who influenced her, many of Cather’s main characters are immigrants who feel disconnected from their surroundings. These characters find a sense of belonging through their connection to their environment. Susan J. Rosowski noted that Cather may have been the first writer to give immigrants a respected place in American literature.

Personal life

Scholars have different opinions about Willa Cather's sexual identity. Some believe it is not possible or not appropriate to know if she had same-sex attraction, while others think it is possible. Deborah Carlin, a researcher, says that denying Cather was a lesbian comes from seeing same-sex desire as harmful to Cather's reputation, not as a fair historical view. Melissa Homestead argues that Cather was close to Edith Lewis and asks what kind of evidence is needed to prove their relationship was lesbian. She says photographs of them together in bed would be one example. Homestead also says Lewis was very important to Cather's life, both creatively and personally. Some people also think Cather's use of male characters in her writing supports the idea she had same-sex attraction. Harold Bloom says her writing avoids discussing romantic feelings because of social rules at the time.

Throughout Cather's adult life, her closest relationships were with women. These included her college friend Louise Pound; Isabelle McClung, a socialite from Pittsburgh who traveled with Cather to Europe and hosted her in Toronto; Olive Fremstad, an opera singer; and Edith Lewis, with whom Cather lived for 39 years.

Cather and Lewis began their relationship in the early 1900s. They lived together in New York City from 1908 until Cather's death in 1947. From 1913 to 1927, they lived at No. 5 Bank Street in Greenwich Village. They moved when the apartment was going to be torn down during subway construction. Lewis was chosen to manage Cather's estate and helped with her writing, not just keeping her papers.

Starting in 1922, Cather spent summers on Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick, where she bought a cottage in Whale Cove. Her short story "Before Breakfast" is set there. She liked the quiet of the island and did not mind that her cottage had no indoor plumbing or electricity. People could reach her only by telegraph or mail. In 1940, she stopped visiting the island after Canada joined World War II, which made travel harder. She also began recovering from gallbladder surgery in 1942, which limited her ability to travel.

Cather was very private and destroyed many drafts, letters, and personal papers, asking others to do the same. Some followed her request, but not all. Her will limited how scholars could use the remaining papers. In 2013, a book of 566 letters Cather wrote to friends, family, and writers like Thornton Wilder and F. Scott Fitzgerald was published, two years after her nephew and executor, Charles Cather, died. These letters show the complexity of her character and reveal that her main emotional connections were with women. The Willa Cather Archive at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln works to make her complete writing available online. As of 2021, about 2,100 letters and her published works were freely available to the public.

Legacy

In 1962, Willa Cather was added to the Nebraska Hall of Fame.

In 1973, the United States Postal Service created a postage stamp to honor her.

In 1974, she was added to the Hall of Great Westerners.

In 1986, she was added to the Hall of Fame at the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame.

In 1988, she was added to the National Women's Hall of Fame.

In 2000, she was named one of the Virginia Women in History.

In 2023, the U.S. state of Nebraska gave a bronze sculpture of Cather, created by Littleton Alston, to the National Statuary Hall Collection. The statue is installed in the United States Capitol's Capitol Visitors Center, in Washington, D.C.