 Wilella Sibert Cather was born on December 7, 1873, in the small Virginia farming community of Winchester. When she was ten years old, her parents moved the family to the prairies of Nebraska, where her father opened a farm mortgage and insurance business.
Home-schooled before enrolling in the local high school, Cather had a mind of her own, changing her given name to Willa and adopting a variation of her grandmother’s maiden name, Seibert, as her middle name.
As a young woman she met Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a schoolmate who would later become the main character in her acclaimed novel My Ántonia (1918).
During Cather’s studies at the University of Nebraska, she worked as a drama critic to support herself and published her first piece of short fiction, “Peter,” in a Boston magazine.
After graduation, her love of music and intellectual pursuits inspired her to move to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she edited the family magazine Home Monthly, wrote theater criticism for the Pittsburgh Daily Leader, and taught English and Latin in local high schools.
Cather published her first short story collection, The Troll Garden, in 1905. She moved to New York City the following year to work for McClure’s Magazine as a writer and eventually the magazine’s managing editor.
Considered one of the great figures of early-twentieth-century American literature, Willa Cather derived her inspiration from the American Midwest, which she considered her home.
Never married, she cherished her many friendships, some of which she had maintained since childhood. Her intimate coterie of women writers and artists motivated Cather to produce some of her best work. Sarah Orne Jewett, a successful author from Maine whom Cather had met during her McClure’s years, inspired her to devote herself full-time to creating literature and to write about her childhood, which she did in several novels of the prairies; one of the best known is O Pioneers! (1913), whose title comes from a poem by Walt Whitman.
A critic of the rise of materialism, Cather addressed the social impact of the developing industrial age in A Lost Lady (1923), which was made into a film starring Barbara Stanwyck. For One of Ours (1922), a novel about World War I, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.
In her later years Cather produced some of her most recognized work. For Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) she won a gold medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1933 she received the Prix Femina Americaine for Shadows on the Rock (1931), a collection of short stories.
Two years after publishing her last novel, The Best Years (1945), Willa Cather died of a cerebral hemorrhage, on April 24, 1947, in New York City.
A collection of short fiction, The Old Beauty and Others (1948), and a literary treatise, On Writing (1949), were published after her death.
Among Cather’s other accomplishments were honorary doctorate degrees from Columbia, Princeton, and Yale Universities. [edit]
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