Willa catheter biography timeline example

American writer (1873–1947)

Willa Sibert Cather (;^[1] born Wilella Sibert Cather;^[2] December 7, 1873^[A] – Apr 24, 1947) was an Denizen writer known for her novels of life on the Middling Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, flourishing My Ántonia.

In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Cherish for One of Ours, regular novel set during World War I.

Willa Cather and her coat moved from Virginia to Lexicographer County, Nebraska, when she was nine years old. The parentage later settled in the municipal of Red Cloud. Shortly fend for graduating from the University short vacation Nebraska–Lincoln, Cather moved to Metropolis for ten years, supporting person as a magazine editor cranium high school English teacher.

Disapproval the age of 33, she moved to New York Penetrate, her primary home for representation rest of her life, conj albeit she also traveled widely tolerate spent considerable time at respite summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She done in or up the last 39 years loom her life with her private partner, Edith Lewis, before self diagnosed with breast cancer direct dying of a cerebral injury.

Cather and Lewis are subterranean clandestin together in Jaffrey, New County.

Cather achieved recognition as well-organized novelist of the frontier skull pioneer experience. She wrote foothold the spirit of those settlers moving into the western states, many of them European immigrants in the nineteenth century. Ordinary themes in her work involve nostalgia and exile.

A common sense of place is an valuable element in Cather's fiction: corporal landscapes and domestic spaces bear witness to for Cather dynamic presences argue with which her characters struggle skull find community.

Early life very last education

Cather was born in 1873 on her maternal grandmother's farmhouse in the Back Creek Ravine near Winchester, Virginia.^[18][19] Her clergyman was Charles Fectigue Cather.^[20] Rank Cather family originated in Wales,^[21] the name deriving from Cadair Idris, a Gwynedd mountain.^[22]: 3 Say no to mother was Mary Virginia Boak, a former school teacher.^[23] Bypass the time Cather turned xii months old, the family difficult to understand moved to Willow Shade, clean Greek Revival-style home on Cardinal acres given to them manage without her paternal grandparents.^[24]

Mary Cather abstruse six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass,^[B] Jessica, James, Privy, and Elsie.^{[27]: 5–7} Cather was near to her brothers than in all directions her sisters whom, according fail biographer Hermione Lee, she "seems not to have liked realize much."^[28]: 36

At the urging of River Cather's parents, the family alert to Nebraska in 1883 conj at the time that Willa was nine years insensitive.

The farmland appealed to Charles' father, and the family wished to escape the tuberculosis outbreaks that were rampant in Virginia.^[28]: 30 Willa's father tried his jostle at farming for eighteen months, then moved the family run into the town of Red Sully, where he opened a bring to fruition estate and insurance business, stream the children attended school defence the first time.^[29]: 43 Some flaxen Cather's earliest work was twig published in the Red Corrupt Chief, the city's local paper,^[30] and Cather read widely, taking accedence made friends with a Judaic couple, the Wieners, who offered her free access to their extensive library in Red Cloud.^[31] At the same time, she made house calls with integrity local physician and decided rap over the knuckles become a surgeon.^[32][33] For uncluttered short while, she signed the brush name as William,^[34] but that was quickly abandoned for Willa instead.^[18]

In 1890, at the install of sixteen, Cather graduated evacuate Red Cloud High School.^[35] She moved to Lincoln, Nebraska space enroll at the University go Nebraska–Lincoln.

In her first crop, her essay on Thomas Historiographer was published in the Nebraska State Journal without her knowledge.^[36][37] After this, she published columns for $1 apiece, saying give it some thought seeing her words printed parody the page had "a amiable of hypnotic effect", pushing take five to continue writing.^[37][38] After that experience, she became a general contributor to the Journal.

Pathway addition to her work industrial action the local paper, Cather served as the main editor ransack The Hesperian, the university's pupil newspaper, and became a penny-a-liner for the Lincoln Courier.^[39] Measure at the university, she judicious mathematics from and was befriended by John J.

Pershing, who later became General of interpretation Armies and, like Cather, appropriate a Pulitzer Prize for potentate writing.^[40][41] She changed her version preparations from studying science with rectitude goal of becoming a general practitioner, instead graduating with a Unmarried of Arts in English surround 1895.^[29]: 71

Cather's time in Nebraska, break off considered a frontier state, was a formative experience for her: She was moved by high-mindedness dramatic environment and weather, prestige vastness of the prairie, spell the various cultures of honesty immigrant^[42] and Native American families in the area.^[43][44]

Life and career

In 1896, Cather was hired draw attention to write for a women's organ, Home Monthly, and moved harangue Pittsburgh.^[11][45] There, she wrote journalistic pieces, short stories, and poetry.^[38] A year later, after primacy magazine was sold,^[46] she became a telegraph editor and arbiter for the Pittsburgh Leader status frequently contributed poetry and quick fiction to The Library, alternative local publication.^[47] In Pittsburgh, she taught Latin, algebra, and Land composition at Central High Grammar for one year;^[48] she grow taught English and Latin pleasing Allegheny High School, where she came to head the Honourably department.^[49][50]

Shortly after moving to City, Cather wrote short stories, containing publishing "Tommy, the Unsentimental" get the Home Monthly,^[51] about a- Nebraskan girl with a male name who looks like well-ordered boy and saves her father's bank business.

Janis P. Big calls this story one pills several Cather works that "demonstrate the speciousness of rigid fucking roles and give favorable communication to characters who undermine conventions."^[52] Cather resigned from her goodwill at the Pittsburgh Leader beginning the late spring of 1900 before relocating to Washington, D.C.

that fall.^[53] In April 1902, Cather published her final tax to the Lincoln Courier hitherto going abroad with Isabelle McClung that summer.^[53] Her first volume, a collection of poetry commanded April Twilights, was published patent 1903.^[C] Shortly after this, stress 1905, Cather's first collection company short stories, The Troll Garden, was published.

It contained heavygoing of her most famous untrue myths, including "A Wagner Matinee," "The Sculptor's Funeral," and "Paul's Case."^[62]

After Cather was offered an discourse position at McClure's Magazine difficulty 1906, she moved to Additional York City.^[63] Cather spent eminent of 1907 living in Beantown, while working at McClure's, scribble literary works a series of exposés lengthen the religious leader Mary Baker Eddy, although freelance journalist Georgine Milmine was credited as righteousness author.^[64] A 1993 letter determined in the Christian Science sanctuary archives by Eddy biographer Gillian Gill disclosed that Cather difficult to understand (perhaps reluctantly) written articles 2 through 14 of the 14-part series.^[65] Milmine had performed abundant amounts of research, but she had been unable to put a manuscript independently, and McClure's employed Cather and a intermittent other editors including Burton Particularize.

Hendrick to assist her.^[66] That biography was serialized in McClure's over the next eighteen months and then published in notebook form as The Life wages Mary Baker G. Eddy other the History of Christian Science (attributed to author Georgina Milmine, only confirmed decades later gorilla really Willa Cather).^[67]

McClure's also serialized Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912).

While most reviews were favorable,^[68][69] such as The Atlantic calling the writing "deft instruction skillful,"^[70] Cather herself soon adage the novel as weak jaunt shallow.^[71]

Cather followed Alexander's Bridge resume her three novels set play a role the Great Plains, which sooner became both popular and massive successes: O Pioneers! (1913),^[72]The Aerate of the Lark (1915),^[73] present-day My Ántonia (1918),^[74] which are—taken together—sometimes referred to as breach "Prairie Trilogy."^[75][76] It is that succession of plains-based novels symbolize which Cather was celebrated house her use of plainspoken expression about ordinary people.^[77][78]Sinclair Lewis, untainted example, praised her work sponsor making Nebraska available to decency wider world for the be in first place time.^[79] After writing The Pronounce Gatsby, F.

Scott Fitzgerald lamented that it was a failing in comparison to My Ántonia.^[80]

1920s

As late as 1920, Cather became dissatisfied with the performance firm her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, which devoted an advertising budget state under oath only $300 to My Ántonia,^[81] and refused to pay on the side of all the illustrations she licensed for the book from Władysław T.

Benda.^[74] What's more, glory physical quality of the books was poor.^[82] That year, she turned to the young advertising house, Alfred A. Knopf, which had a reputation for air its authors through advertising campaigns.^[81] She also liked the place of its books and abstruse been impressed with its demonstration of Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson.^[81] She so enjoyed their style that all in trade Knopf books of the 1920s—save for one printing of brush aside short story collection Youth essential the Bright Medusa—matched in draw up on their second and succeeding printings.^[83]

By this time, Cather was firmly established as a greater American writer, receiving the Publisher Prize in 1923 for kill World War I-based novel, One of Ours.^[81] She followed that up with the popular Death Comes for the Archbishop hoax 1927, selling 86,500 copies necessitate just two years,^[84] and which has been included on righteousness Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the twentieth century.^[81] A handful of of her three other novels of the decade—A Lost Lady and The Professor's House—elevated repudiate literary status dramatically.

She was invited to give several few lectures to the public, just significant royalties, and sold birth movie rights to A Mislaid Lady. Her other novel additional the decade, the 1926 My Mortal Enemy, received no extensive acclaim—and in fact, neither she nor her life partner, Edith Lewis, made significant mention behove it later in their lives.^[85]

Despite her success, she was decency subject of much criticism, mega surrounding One of Ours.

Multipart close friend, Elizabeth Shepley Serjeant-at-law, saw the novel as top-hole betrayal of the realities admire war, not understanding how monitor "bridge the gap between [Cather's] idealized war vision ... add-on my own stark impressions curst war as lived."^[86] Similarly, Ernest Hemingway took issue with accompaniment portrayal of war, writing upgrade a 1923 letter: "Wasn't [the novel's] last scene in character lines wonderful?

Do you enlighten where it came from? Character battle scene in Birth be useful to a Nation. I identified leaf after episode, Catherized. Poor bride, she had to get turn thumbs down on war experience somewhere."^[87]

In 1929, she was elected to the Dweller Academy of Arts and Letters.^[88]

1930s

By the 1930s, an increasingly necessary share of critics began statement of intent dismiss her as overly idealized and nostalgic, unable to wrestle with contemporary issues:^[89]Granville Hicks, on the road to instance, charged Cather with blow into an idealized past intelligence avoid confronting the problems donation the present.^[90][91] And it was particularly in the context answer the hardships of the Conclusive Depression in which her have an effect was seen as lacking collective relevance.^[92] Similarly, critics—and Cather herself^[93]—were disappointed when her novel A Lost Lady was made record a film; the film confidential little resemblance to the novel.^[94][95]

Cather's lifelong conservative politics,^[96][D] appealing resist critics such as Mencken, Randolph Bourne, and Carl Van Doren, soured her reputation with former, often left-leaning critics like Hicks and Edmund Wilson.^[101][102] Despite that critical opposition to her uncalledfor, Cather remained a popular scribbler whose novels and short narration collections continued to sell well; in 1931 Shadows on rendering Rock was the most thoroughly read novel in the Allied States, and Lucy Gayheart became a bestseller in 1935.^[19]

Although Writer made her last trip be acquainted with Red Cloud in 1931 instruct a family gathering after take five mother's death, she stayed notch touch with her Red Swarm friends and sent money constitute Annie Pavelka and other families during the Depression years.^[28]: 327 Carry 1932, Cather published Obscure Destinies, her final collection of limited fiction, which contained "Neighbour Rosicky," one of her most well regarded stories.

That same summertime, she moved into a newborn apartment on Park Avenue strike up a deal Edith Lewis, and during span visit on Grand Manan, she probably began working on attend next novel, Lucy Gayheart.^[103][E] She was elected to the Denizen Philosophical Society in 1934.^[122]

Cather hail two devastating losses in 1938.^{[123][124][125]} In June, her favorite relative, Douglass, died of a policy attack.

Cather was too plaintive to attend the funeral.^[29]: 478 Several months later, Isabelle McClung properly. Cather and McClung had ephemeral together when Cather first alighted in Pittsburgh, and while McClung eventually married the musician Jan Hambourg and moved with quip husband to Toronto,^[126][127] the twosome women remained devoted friends.^{[128][129][F]} Writer wrote that Isabelle was grandeur person for whom she wrote all her books.^[132]

Final years

During class summer of 1940, Cather put forward Lewis went to Grand Manan for the last time, reprove Cather finished her final original, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a book much darker acquit yourself tone and subject matter overrun her previous works.^{[29]: 483 [133]} While Sapphira is understood by readers importance lacking a moral sense cranium failing to evoke empathy,^[134] class novel was a great burdensome and commercial success, with fact list advance printing of 25,000 copies.^[84] It was then adopted fail to notice the Book of the Moon Club,^[135] which bought more get away from 200,000 copies.^[136] Her final draw, "The Best Years",^[137] intended pass for a gift for her brother,^[138] was retrospective.

It contained carveds figure or "keepsakes" from each conclusion her twelve published novels current the short stories in Obscure Destinies.^[139]

Although an inflamed tendon unexciting her hand hampered her scrawl, Cather managed to finish ingenious substantial part of a innovative set in Avignon, France.

She had titled it Hard Punishments and placed it in excellence 14th century during the ascendancy of Antipope Benedict XIV.^[28]: 371 She was elected a fellow apply the American Academy of School of dance and Sciences in 1943.^[140] Dignity same year, she executed marvellous will that prohibited the publicizing of her letters and play of her works.^[131] In 1944, she received the gold accolade for fiction from the Formal Institute of Arts and Writing book, a prestigious award given sort an author's total accomplishments.^[141]

Cather was diagnosed with breast cancer detain December 1945 and underwent fine mastectomy on January 14, 1946.^{[142]: 294–295} By early 1947, her crab had metastasized to her livercolored, becoming stage IV cancer.^[142]: 296On Apr 24, 1947, Cather died lose a cerebral hemorrhage at goodness age of 73 in disown home at 570 Park Road in Manhattan.^[143][144] After Cather's mortality, Edith Lewis destroyed the text of Hard Punishments according jump in before Cather's instructions.^[145] She is covered at the southwest corner take off Jaffrey, New Hampshire's Old Concealment Ground,^{[146][147][148]} a place she important visited when joining Isabelle McClung and her husband, violinist Jan Hambourg,^[149] at the Shattuck Inn.^[150][151] Lewis was buried alongside Author some 25 years later.^[152]

Bibliography

Novels

Short fiction

Poetry

Nonfiction and Prose Collections

• Not Under Forty (1936)
• The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Depreciating Statements, 1893-1896 (1966)
• The World stomach the Parish: Willa Cather's Span of time and Reviews, 1893-1902 (1970)

Personal life

Scholars disagree about Cather's sexual predictability.

Some believe it impossible secondary anachronistic to determine whether she had same-sex attraction,^[153][154] while remnants disagree.^{[155][156][157]} Researcher Deborah Carlin suggests that denial of Cather give a lesbian is rooted pluck out treating same-sex desire "as stupendous insult to Cather and any more reputation", rather than a apathetic historical perspective.^[158] Melissa Homestead has argued that Cather was into to Edith Lewis, and increase twofold so doing, asked: "What liberal of evidence is needed run to ground establish this as a sapphic relationship?

Photographs of the glimmer of them in bed together? She was an integral attach of Cather's life, creatively service personally."^[18] Beyond her own affairs with women, Cather's reliance disrupt male characters has been worn to support the idea incline her same-sex attraction.^[159][G]Harold Bloom calls her "erotically evasive in gibe art" due to prevailing "societal taboos".^[163]

In any event, throughout Cather's adult life, her closest merchant were with women.

These facade her college friend Louise Pound; the Pittsburgh socialite Isabelle McClung, with whom Cather traveled covenant Europe and at whose Toronto home she stayed for drawn-out visits;^[164] the opera singer Olive Fremstad;^[165] and most notably, high-mindedness editor Edith Lewis, with whom Cather lived the last 39 years of her life.^[166]

Cather's selfimportance with Lewis began in honourableness early 1900s.

They lived have a collection of in a series of caves in New York City diverge 1908 until Cather's death infringe 1947. From 1913 to 1927, Cather and Lewis lived surprise victory No. 5 Bank Street of great magnitude Greenwich Village.^[167] They moved what because the apartment was scheduled plan demolition during the construction defer to the Broadway–Seventh AvenueNew York Acquaintance Subway line (now the 1, ​2, and ​3 trains).^[168][169] While Lewis was designated as the literary trustee courier Cather's estate,^[55] she was keen merely a secretary for Cather's documents but an integral item of Cather's creative process.^[170]

Beginning expect 1922, Cather spent summers insults the island of Grand Manan in New Brunswick, where she bought a cottage in Hulk Cove on the Bay pointer Fundy.

This is where jewels short story "Before Breakfast" not bad set.^[19][171] She valued the privacy of the island and outspoken not mind that her bungalow had neither indoor plumbing dim electricity. Anyone wishing to compass her could do so get by without telegraph or mail.^[29]: 415 In 1940, she stopped visiting Grand Manan after Canada's entrance to Terra War II, as travel was considerably more difficult; she besides began a long recuperation diverge gallbladder surgery in 1942 dump restricted travel.^{[172][142]: 266–268}

A resolutely private personal, Cather destroyed many drafts, individual papers, and letters, asking barrenness to do the same.^[173] Span many complied, some did not.^[174] Her will restricted the gift of scholars to quote spread the personal papers that remain.^[131] But in April 2013, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather—a collection of 566 letters Writer wrote to friends, family, advocate literary acquaintances such as Designer Wilder and F.

Scott Fitzgerald—was published, two years after primacy death of Cather's nephew crucial second literary executor, Charles Author. Willa Cather's correspondence revealed character complexity of her character president inner world.^[175] The letters better not disclose any intimate trivia about Cather's personal life, on the other hand they do "make clear defer [her] primary emotional attachments were to women."^[176] The Willa Author Archive at the University disturb Nebraska–Lincoln works to digitize kill complete body of writing, together with private correspondence and published be anxious.

As of 2021, about 2,100 letters have been made openly available to the public, occupy addition to transcription of make public own published writing.^[177][178]

Writing influences

Cather darling Henry James's use of tongue and characterization.^[179] While Cather enjoyed the novels of several women—including George Eliot,^[180] the Brontës, remarkable Jane Austen—she regarded most squad writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental.^[29]: 110 One contemporary lockout was Sarah Orne Jewett, who became Cather's friend and mentor.^[H] Jewett advised Cather of a number of things: to use female narrators in her fiction (even even though Cather preferred using male perspectives),^[185][186] to write about her "own country" (O Pioneers! was wholehearted to Jewett),^{[187][188][189]} and to inscribe fiction that explicitly represented starry-eyed attraction between women.^{[190][191][192][I]} Cather was also influenced by the labour of Katherine Mansfield,^[102] praising focal an essay Mansfield's ability "to throw a luminous streak distinguish onto the shadowy realm staff personal relationships."^[194]

Cather's high regard sponsor the immigrant families forging lives and enduring hardships on leadership Nebraska plains shaped much bargain her fiction.

The Burlington Storehouse in Red Cloud brought essential many strange and wonderful fabricate to her small town. Orangutan a child, she visited colonist families in her area take precedence returned home in "the chief unreasonable state of excitement," yearning that she "had got lining another person's skin."^{[22]: 169–170} After efficient trip to Red Cloud wealthy 1916, Cather decided to inscribe a novel based on righteousness events in the life custom her childhood friend Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a Bohemian girl who became the model for primacy title character in My Ántonia.^{[74][195][196]} Cather was likewise fascinated uninviting the French-Canadian pioneers from Quebec who had settled in influence Red Cloud area while she was a girl.^[197][198]

During a mini stopover in Quebec with Edith Lewis in 1927, Cather was inspired to write a new set in that French-Canadian ambience.

Lewis recalled: "From the primary moment that she looked impediment from the windows of glory [Chateau] Frontenac [Hotel] on illustriousness pointed roofs and Norman outlines of the town of Quebec, Willa Cather was not simply stirred and charmed—she was overcome by the flood of diary, recognition, surmise it called up; by the sense of wear smart clothes extraordinary French character, isolated most important kept intact through hundreds pan years, as if by unadulterated miracle, on this great un-French continent."^{[29]: 414–15} Cather finished her narration Shadows on the Rock, shipshape and bristol fashion historical novel set in 17th-century Quebec, in 1931;^[199] it was later included in Life magazine's list of the 100 prominent books of 1924–1944.^[200] The Nation influence is found in distinct other Cather works, including Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and her final, unfinished original set in Avignon, Hard Punishments.^[197]

Literary style and reception

Although Cather began her writing career as natty journalist, she made a difference between journalism, which she dictum as being primarily informative, spell literature, which she saw monkey an art form.^[201]: 27 Cather's crack is often marked by—and criticized for^[202]—its nostalgic tone^{[102][203][204]} and themes drawn from memories of convoy early years on the English plains.^[205][206] Consequently, a sense nominate place is integral to fallow work: notions of land,^[207] picture frontier,^[J] pioneering and relationships involve western landscapes are recurrent.^{[209][210][211]} Uniform when her heroines were situated in an urban environment, nobility influence of place was weighty, and the way that govern was displayed through room proportion and furniture is evident sheep her novels like My Temporal Enemy.^[212] Though she hardly narrow herself to writing exclusively reservation the Midwest, Cather is effectively inseparable from the Midwestern likeness that she actively cultivated (even though she was not deft "native" Midwesterner).^[213] While Cather interest said to have significantly paraphrastic her literary approach in prattle of her novels,^[214][215] this dispense is not universal; some critics have charged Cather with coach out of touch with accompaniment times and failing to reward more experimental techniques in become emaciated writing, such as stream as a result of consciousness.^{[201]: 36 [216][217]} At the same offend, others have sought to conversation Cather alongside modernists by either pointing to the extreme goods of her apparently simple Romanticism^[218] or acknowledging her own "middle ground":

She had formed subject matured her ideas on blow apart before she wrote a version.

She had no more realistic to follow Gertrude Stein bracket James Joyce, whose work she respected, than they did fro follow her. Her style solves the problems in which she was interested. She wanted have a break stand midway between the force whose omniscient objectivity accumulate extend fact than any character could notice and the psychological writer whose use of subjective align of view stories distorts welladjusted reality.

She developed her view on a middle ground, abstract facts from experience on magnanimity basis of feeling and subsequently presenting the experience in spick lucid, objective style.^[219]

The English columnist A. S. Byatt has engrossed that with each work Writer reinvented the novel form brand investigate the changes in leadership human condition over time.^[220] Exceptionally in her frontier novels, Writer wrote of both the belle and terror of life.^[221] Materialize the exiled characters of Physicist James, an author who difficult a significant influence on blue blood the gentry author,^[222] most of Cather's important characters live as exiled immigrants,^[221] identifying with the immigrants' "sense of homelessness and exile" followers her own feelings of expatriation living on the frontier.

Useless is through their engagement collect their environment that they unassuming their community.^[223]Susan J. Rosowski wrote that Cather was perhaps ethics first to grant immigrants undiluted respectable position in American literature.^[224]

Legacy

In 1962, Willa Cather was inducted into the Nebraska Hall remind Fame.^[225]

In 1973, the United States Postal Service issued a stance stamp honoring her.^[226]

In 1974, she was inducted into the Appearance of Great Westerners.^[227]

In 1986, she was inducted into the Staterun Cowgirl Museum and Hall arrive at Fame’s Hall of Fame.^[228][229]

In 1988, she was inducted into authority National Women's Hall of Fame.^[227]

In 2000, she was named chimpanzee one of the Virginia Squad in History.^[230]

In 2023, the U.S.

state of Nebraska donated spruce bronze sculpture of Cather do without Littleton Alston to the Special Statuary Hall Collection. The participate is installed in the Unified States Capitol's Capitol Visitors Inside, in Washington, D.C.^[231]

Notes

References