Willa Cather

Willa Cather was nine when her family moved from Virginia to the Nebraska plains in 1883. She later said the shock of that empty country was the turning point of her life. The prairie around Red Cloud was being settled by Czech, Swedish, German, and Norwegian immigrants, and she spent her girlhood visiting their homesteads, listening to the older women tell stories in languages she did not yet understand.

She studied at the University of Nebraska, worked as a journalist and teacher in Pittsburgh, and became managing editor of McClure's Magazine in New York, the leading muckraking journal of its day. Sarah Orne Jewett, the Maine writer, urged her to stop imitating Henry James and write about her own country. In 1912 she left the magazine to write full-time.

O Pioneers!, published in 1913, and My Ántonia, in 1918, are novels of immigrant women breaking the land. Ántonia Shimerda, the Bohemian girl remembered by a boyhood friend, endures poverty, hard labor, and betrayal and ends as the mother of a large and thriving farm family, a figure Cather described as a rich mine of life. The books gave the settlement of the plains a dignity and depth that frontier fiction had rarely offered. One of Ours won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.

In her later work she turned to the Southwest and to the past. Death Comes for the Archbishop, published in 1927, follows two French priests in New Mexico in the nineteenth century, and Shadows on the Rock is set in seventeenth-century Quebec. She lived for nearly forty years in New York with the editor Edith Lewis, guarded her privacy fiercely, and left instructions that her letters never be published. She died in 1947. Her letters were finally published in 2013, adding to a reputation as one of the finest stylists in American prose.