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Nov 15, 2023 · Willa’s grandfather William Cather, of Welsh ancestry, had stayed resolutely Unionist. Her mother’s people, the Boaks, were secessionists. Her uncle William Seibert Boak had died of his wounds at Manassas. Willa’s mother, Virginia Boak Cather, revered the memory of this nineteen-year-old, her favorite brother, and kept his saber and ...
Beginning in the 1980s, International Willa Cather Seminars have been held in locations important to Cather and to her works. The most recent one, in 2023, was held in New York City—her residence from 1906 to 1947—but seminars have also been held in Nebraska, Quebec City (with a pre-trip to Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick), Virginia ...
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Edith Lewis ( c. 1908 –1947) Signature. Willa Sibert Cather ( / ˈkæðər /; [1] born Wilella Sibert Cather; [2] December 7, 1873 [A] – April 24, 1947) was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of ...
Feb 11, 2024 · Farmers like Willa’s dad were convinced by the ads that the Plains were an agricultural paradise. But agriculture requires water. In the 1870s Nebraska was corn-obsessed; by the 1890s, even its hardiest farmers were stepping back and rethinking, after trying, unsuccessfully, to get water out of the stony unyielding dirt.
- Early Life on The Prairie
- Student, Teacher, Journalist
- Literary Success in New York City
- Later Years
- Legacy
- Sources
Willa Cather was born on the farm of her maternal grandmother, Rachel Boak, in the poor farming region of Back Creek Valley, Virginia, on December 7, 1873. The oldest of seven children, she was the daughter of Charles Cather and Mary Cather (née Boak). Despite the Cather family having spent several generations in Virginia, Charles moved his family ...
Willa attended the University of Nebraska, where her career plans took an unexpected turn. During her freshman year, her English professor submitted an essay she had written on Thomas Carlyle to the Nebraska State Journal, which published it. Seeing her name in print had a huge impact on the young student, and she shifted her aspirations immediatel...
Willa was extremely successful at McClure’s. She ghostwrote a notable biography of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, which was credited to researcher Georgine Milmine and published in several installments around 1907. Her position as managing editor earned her prestige and the admiration of McClure himself, but it also meant that she had s...
As the 1930s rolled around, literary critics soured on Willa’s books, criticizing them for being too nostalgic and not contemporary enough. She continued to publish, but at a much slower pace than before. During this time, she received honorary degrees from Yale, Princeton, and Berkeley. Her personal life also began to take a toll. Her mother and t...
Willa Cather left behind a canon that was both plainspoken and elegant, accessible and deeply nuanced. Her portrayals of immigrants and women (and of immigrant women) have been at the center of much modern scholarship. With a style that encompassed sweeping epics along with realistic depictions of frontier life, Willa Cather’s writings have become ...
Ahearn, Amy. "Willa Cather: A Longer Biographical Sketch." Willa Cather Archive, https://cather.unl.edu/life.longbio.html.Smiley, Jane. "Willa Cather, Pioneer." The Paris Review, 27 February 2018, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/02/27/willa-cather-pioneer.Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.Cather “made the outside world know Nebraska as no one else has done,” Sinclair Lewis once said. Six miles outside Red Cloud, Nebraska, the blackness is absolute. Before sunrise the moonless ...
Nov 15, 2023 · Her parents purchased a story-and-a-half frame house on the southwest corner of Third and Cedar, and crowded their growing family of children—Willa, Roscoe, Douglass, Elsie—and Mrs. Cather’s mother, and a servant girl, into it. Three more children, John, Jessica, and James, were shortly to follow.
