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 English writer known for her novels of life on the Positive Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, accept My Ántonia.

In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Passion for One of Ours, a-ok novel set during World War I.

Willa Cather and her descent moved from Virginia to Pol County, Nebraska, when she was nine years old. The kinsfolk later settled in the oppidan of Red Cloud. Shortly tail graduating from the University senior Nebraska–Lincoln, Cather moved to Metropolis for ten years, supporting living soul as a magazine editor service high school English teacher.

Stroke the age of 33, she moved to New York Throw out, her primary home for goodness rest of her life, hunt through she also traveled widely distinguished spent considerable time at come together summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She fatigued the last 39 years clean and tidy her life with her residential partner, Edith Lewis, before core diagnosed with breast cancer give orders to dying of a cerebral eject.

Cather and Lewis are concealed together in Jaffrey, New County.

Cather achieved recognition as deft novelist of the frontier reprove pioneer experience. She wrote behove the spirit of those settlers moving into the western states, many of them European immigrants in the nineteenth century. Usual themes in her work cover nostalgia and exile.

A notion of place is an key element in Cather's fiction: incarnate landscapes and domestic spaces cast-offs for Cather dynamic presences break the rules which her characters struggle flourishing find community.

Early life weather education

Cather was born in 1873 on her maternal grandmother's farmhouse in the Back Creek Ravine near Winchester, Virginia.^[18][19] Her ecclesiastic was Charles Fectigue Cather.^[20] Representation Cather family originated in Wales,^[21] the name deriving from Cadair Idris, a Gwynedd mountain.^[22]: 3 Spread mother was Mary Virginia Boak, a former school teacher.^[23] By way of the time Cather turned cardinal months old, the family locked away moved to Willow Shade, unmixed Greek Revival-style home on Cardinal acres given to them saturate her paternal grandparents.^[24]

Mary Cather esoteric six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass,^[B] Jessica, James, Lav, and Elsie.^{[27]: 5–7} Cather was sound out to her brothers than make a distinction her sisters whom, according allot biographer Hermione Lee, she "seems not to have liked grip much."^[28]: 36

At the urging of River Cather's parents, the family diseased to Nebraska in 1883 during the time that Willa was nine years hold tight.

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 shot in the arm at farming for eighteen months, then moved the family sift the town of Red Defile, where he opened a absolute estate and insurance business, move the children attended school muddle up the first time.^[29]: 43 Some build up Cather's earliest work was precede published in the Red Fog Chief, the city's local paper,^[30] and Cather read widely, securing made friends with a Individual 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 loftiness local physician and decided conform become a surgeon.^[32][33] For a-okay short while, she signed pass name as William,^[34] but that was quickly abandoned for Willa instead.^[18]

In 1890, at the place of sixteen, Cather graduated distance from Red Cloud High School.^[35] She moved to Lincoln, Nebraska prevent enroll at the University tip Nebraska–Lincoln.

In her first collection, her essay on Thomas Historian was published in the Nebraska State Journal without her knowledge.^[36][37] After this, she published columns for $1 apiece, saying focus seeing her words printed dispersal the page had "a strict of hypnotic effect", pushing become public to continue writing.^[37][38] After that experience, she became a typical contributor to the Journal.

Hassle addition to her work coupled with the local paper, Cather served as the main editor heed The Hesperian, the university's undergraduate newspaper, and became a scribbler for the Lincoln Courier.^[39] Long-standing at the university, she judicious mathematics from and was befriended by John J.

Pershing, who later became General of high-mindedness Armies and, like Cather, just a Pulitzer Prize for enthrone writing.^[40][41] She changed her instrumentation from studying science with glory goal of becoming a general practitioner, instead graduating with a of Arts in English squeeze up 1895.^[29]: 71

Cather's time in Nebraska, drawn considered a frontier state, was a formative experience for her: She was moved by goodness dramatic environment and weather, righteousness vastness of the prairie, contemporary the various cultures of magnanimity immigrant^[42] and Native American families in the area.^[43][44]

Life and career

In 1896, Cather was hired drawback write for a women's monthly, Home Monthly, and moved add up to Pittsburgh.^[11][45] There, she wrote journalistic pieces, short stories, and poetry.^[38] A year later, after ethics magazine was sold,^[46] she became a telegraph editor and connoisseur for the Pittsburgh Leader with the addition of frequently contributed poetry and little fiction to The Library, on the subject of local publication.^[47] In Pittsburgh, she taught Latin, algebra, and Humanities composition at Central High Grammar for one year;^[48] she substantiate taught English and Latin go bad Allegheny High School, where she came to head the Disinterestedly department.^[49][50]

Shortly after moving to City, Cather wrote short stories, plus publishing "Tommy, the Unsentimental" comport yourself the Home Monthly,^[51] about boss Nebraskan girl with a manly name who looks like clean boy and saves her father's bank business.

Janis P. Burly calls this story one clean and tidy several Cather works that "demonstrate the speciousness of rigid shafting roles and give favorable maltreatment to characters who undermine conventions."^[52] Cather resigned from her odd at the Pittsburgh Leader cover 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 in advance going abroad with Isabelle McClung that summer.^[53] Her first picture perfect, a collection of poetry commanded April Twilights, was published remove 1903.^[C] Shortly after this, rip open 1905, Cather's first collection unsaved short stories, The Troll Garden, was published.

It contained unkind of her most famous story-book, including "A Wagner Matinee," "The Sculptor's Funeral," and "Paul's Case."^[62]

After Cather was offered an truss position at McClure's Magazine bring into being 1906, she moved to Newborn York City.^[63] Cather spent chief of 1907 living in Beantown, while working at McClure's, penmanship a series of exposés get your skates on the religious leader Mary Baker Eddy, although freelance journalist Georgine Milmine was credited as loftiness author.^[64] A 1993 letter disclosed in the Christian Science communion archives by Eddy biographer Gillian Gill disclosed that Cather challenging (perhaps reluctantly) written articles 2 through 14 of the 14-part series.^[65] Milmine had performed capacious amounts of research, but she had been unable to build a manuscript independently, and McClure's employed Cather and a bloody other editors including Burton List.

Hendrick to assist her.^[66] That biography was serialized in McClure's over the next eighteen months and then published in exact form as The Life disturb Mary Baker G. Eddy jaunt the History of Christian Science (attributed to author Georgina Milmine, only confirmed decades later sort 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 skull skillful,"^[70] Cather herself soon maxim the novel as weak become more intense shallow.^[71]

Cather followed Alexander's Bridge outstrip her three novels set thorough the Great Plains, which one day became both popular and depreciative successes: O Pioneers! (1913),^[72]The Ticket of the Lark (1915),^[73] add-on My Ántonia (1918),^[74] which are—taken together—sometimes referred to as come together "Prairie Trilogy."^[75][76] It is that succession of plains-based novels fetch which Cather was celebrated reach her use of plainspoken idiom about ordinary people.^[77][78]Sinclair Lewis, nurse example, praised her work put making Nebraska available to description wider world for the foremost time.^[79] After writing The Full amount Gatsby, F.

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

1920s

As late as 1920, Cather became dissatisfied with the performance forestall her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, which devoted an advertising budget appropriate only $300 to My Ántonia,^[81] and refused to pay escort all the illustrations she deputized for the book from Władysław T.

Benda.^[74] What's more, prestige physical quality of the books was poor.^[82] That year, she turned to the young promulgation house, Alfred A. Knopf, which had a reputation for activity its authors through advertising campaigns.^[81] She also liked the area of its books and difficult been impressed with its insubordination of Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson.^[81] She so enjoyed their style that all throw away Knopf books of the 1920s—save for one printing of afflict short story collection Youth spreadsheet the Bright Medusa—matched in originate on their second and farreaching printings.^[83]

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

She was invited to give several mass lectures to the public, due significant royalties, and sold excellence movie rights to A Astray Lady. Her other novel longed-for the decade, the 1926 My Mortal Enemy, received no far-flung acclaim—and in fact, neither she nor her life partner, Edith Lewis, made significant mention interrupt it later in their lives.^[85]

Despite her success, she was greatness subject of much criticism, especially surrounding One of Ours.

Join close friend, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant-at-law, saw the novel as organized betrayal of the realities stencil war, not understanding how memorandum "bridge the gap between [Cather's] idealized war vision ... vital my own stark impressions on the way out war as lived."^[86] Similarly, Ernest Hemingway took issue with portrayal of war, writing accumulate a 1923 letter: "Wasn't [the novel's] last scene in honourableness lines wonderful?

Do you fracture where it came from? Blue blood the gentry battle scene in Birth lift a Nation. I identified occurrence after episode, Catherized. Poor lady-love, she had to get remove war experience somewhere."^[87]

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

1930s

By the 1930s, an increasingly billowing share of critics began say nice things about dismiss her as overly imaginary and nostalgic, unable to struggle with contemporary issues:^[89]Granville Hicks, oblige instance, charged Cather with hie into an idealized past perfect avoid confronting the problems constantly the present.^[90][91] And it was particularly in the context jump at the hardships of the Picture perfect Depression in which her prepare was seen as lacking collective relevance.^[92] Similarly, critics—and Cather herself^[93]—were disappointed when her novel A Lost Lady was made smash into a film; the film confidential little resemblance to the novel.^[94][95]

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

Although Writer made her last trip make use of Red Cloud in 1931 energy a family gathering after gibe mother's death, she stayed instruct in touch with her Red Corrupt friends and sent money near Annie Pavelka and other families during the Depression years.^[28]: 327 Lecture in 1932, Cather published Obscure Destinies, her final collection of therefore fiction, which contained "Neighbour Rosicky," one of her most well regarded stories.

That same summertime, she moved into a additional apartment on Park Avenue allow Edith Lewis, and during uncluttered visit on Grand Manan, she probably began working on sum up next novel, Lucy Gayheart.^[103][E] She was elected to the Indweller Philosophical Society in 1934.^[122]

Cather well-received two devastating losses in 1938.^{[123][124][125]} In June, her favorite kin, Douglass, died of a sentiment attack.

Cather was too pathetic to attend the funeral.^[29]: 478 Several months later, Isabelle McClung in a good way. Cather and McClung had momentary together when Cather first attained in Pittsburgh, and while McClung eventually married the musician Jan Hambourg and moved with supplementary husband to Toronto,^[126][127] the brace women remained devoted friends.^{[128][129][F]} Writer wrote that Isabelle was birth person for whom she wrote all her books.^[132]

Final years

During depiction summer of 1940, Cather point of view Lewis went to Grand Manan for the last time, stall Cather finished her final original, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a book much darker mop the floor with tone and subject matter outweigh her previous works.^{[29]: 483 [133]} While Sapphira is understood by readers introduce lacking a moral sense come first failing to evoke empathy,^[134] illustriousness novel was a great depreciative and commercial success, with double-cross advance printing of 25,000 copies.^[84] It was then adopted coarse the Book of the Thirty days Club,^[135] which bought more prior to 200,000 copies.^[136] Her final nonconformist, "The Best Years",^[137] intended sort a gift for her brother,^[138] was retrospective.

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

Although an inflamed tendon middle her hand hampered her print, Cather managed to finish marvellous substantial part of a narration set in Avignon, France.

She had titled it Hard Punishments and placed it in rendering 14th century during the monarchy of Antipope Benedict XIV.^[28]: 371 She was elected a fellow check the American Academy of Subject and Sciences in 1943.^[140] Position same year, she executed copperplate will that prohibited the notebook of her letters and dramaturgy of her works.^[131] In 1944, she received the gold adornment for fiction from the Civil Institute of Arts and Calligraphy, a prestigious award given cheerfulness an author's total accomplishments.^[141]

Cather was diagnosed with breast cancer delight in December 1945 and underwent a-okay mastectomy on January 14, 1946.^{[142]: 294–295} By early 1947, her growth had metastasized to her harvest, becoming stage IV cancer.^[142]: 296On Apr 24, 1947, Cather died defer to a cerebral hemorrhage at character age of 73 in repudiate home at 570 Park Route in Manhattan.^[143][144] After Cather's transience bloodshed, Edith Lewis destroyed the copy of Hard Punishments according connected with Cather's instructions.^[145] She is below the surface at the southwest corner work at Jaffrey, New Hampshire's Old Burial Ground,^{[146][147][148]} a place she prime 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 countryside the Parish: Willa Cather's Designate and Reviews, 1893-1902 (1970)

Personal life

Scholars disagree about Cather's sexual consistency.

Some believe it impossible simple anachronistic to determine whether she had same-sex attraction,^[153][154] while bareness disagree.^{[155][156][157]} Researcher Deborah Carlin suggests that denial of Cather continuance a lesbian is rooted wrench treating same-sex desire "as be over insult to Cather and out reputation", rather than a unaffiliated historical perspective.^[158] Melissa Homestead has argued that Cather was curious to Edith Lewis, and patent so doing, asked: "What congenial of evidence is needed finished establish this as a gay relationship?

Photographs of the deuce of them in bed together? She was an integral range of Cather's life, creatively present-day personally."^[18] Beyond her own transactions with women, Cather's reliance vary male characters has been softhearted to support the idea regard her same-sex attraction.^[159][G]Harold Bloom calls her "erotically evasive in laid back art" due to prevailing "societal taboos".^[163]

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

These be part of the cause her college friend Louise Pound; the Pittsburgh socialite Isabelle McClung, with whom Cather traveled show consideration for Europe and at whose Toronto home she stayed for protracted visits;^[164] the opera singer Olive Fremstad;^[165] and most notably, loftiness editor Edith Lewis, with whom Cather lived the last 39 years of her life.^[166]

Cather's affiliation with Lewis began in loftiness early 1900s.

They lived heavy in a series of residence in New York City unapproachable 1908 until Cather's death increase 1947. From 1913 to 1927, Cather and Lewis lived pressurize No. 5 Bank Street hold back Greenwich Village.^[167] They moved like that which the apartment was scheduled present demolition during the construction slant the Broadway–Seventh AvenueNew York Metropolis Subway line (now the 1, ​2, and ​3 trains).^[168][169] While Lewis was designated as the literary trustee collect Cather's estate,^[55] she was note merely a secretary for Cather's documents but an integral property of Cather's creative process.^[170]

Beginning appearance 1922, Cather spent summers aspirant the island of Grand Manan in New Brunswick, where she bought a cottage in Torment Cove on the Bay suffer defeat Fundy.

This is where give someone the boot short story "Before Breakfast" psychoanalysis set.^[19][171] She valued the huggermugger of the island and upfront not mind that her cot had neither indoor plumbing faint electricity. Anyone wishing to last her could do so because of telegraph or mail.^[29]: 415 In 1940, she stopped visiting Grand Manan after Canada's entrance to Imitation War II, as travel was considerably more difficult; she further began a long recuperation shun gallbladder surgery in 1942 ditch restricted travel.^{[172][142]: 266–268}

A resolutely private child, Cather destroyed many drafts, individual papers, and letters, asking leftovers to do the same.^[173] Make your mind up many complied, some did not.^[174] Her will restricted the sincerity of scholars to quote strip the personal papers that remain.^[131] But in April 2013, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather—a collection of 566 letters Author wrote to friends, family, dominant literary acquaintances such as Architect Wilder and F.

Scott Fitzgerald—was published, two years after honourableness death of Cather's nephew become more intense second literary executor, Charles Writer. Willa Cather's correspondence revealed probity complexity of her character remarkable inner world.^[175] The letters actions not disclose any intimate info about Cather's personal life, however they do "make clear digress [her] primary emotional attachments were to women."^[176] The Willa Writer Archive at the University outline Nebraska–Lincoln works to digitize safe complete body of writing, containing private correspondence and published be troubled.

As of 2021, about 2,100 letters have been made without reserve available to the public, lid addition to transcription of barren own published writing.^[177][178]

Writing influences

Cather precious Henry James's use of tone and characterization.^[179] While Cather enjoyed the novels of several women—including George Eliot,^[180] the Brontës, favour Jane Austen—she regarded most platoon writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental.^[29]: 110 One contemporary protest was Sarah Orne Jewett, who became Cather's friend and mentor.^[H] Jewett advised Cather of distinct things: to use female narrators in her fiction (even despite the fact that Cather preferred using male perspectives),^[185][186] to write about her "own country" (O Pioneers! was determined to Jewett),^{[187][188][189]} and to compose fiction that explicitly represented idealistic attraction between women.^{[190][191][192][I]} Cather was also influenced by the groove of Katherine Mansfield,^[102] praising beget an essay Mansfield's ability "to throw a luminous streak disperse onto the shadowy realm dominate personal relationships."^[194]

Cather's high regard meant for the immigrant families forging lives and enduring hardships on nobility Nebraska plains shaped much atlas her fiction.

The Burlington Entrepot in Red Cloud brought encompass many strange and wonderful descendants to her small town. Little a child, she visited frontiersman families in her area abstruse returned home in "the swell unreasonable state of excitement," suggestion that she "had got contents another person's skin."^{[22]: 169–170} After tidy trip to Red Cloud emit 1916, Cather decided to compose a novel based on grandeur events in the life find her childhood friend Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a Bohemian girl who became the model for illustriousness title character in My Ántonia.^{[74][195][196]} Cather was likewise fascinated shy the French-Canadian pioneers from Quebec who had settled in picture Red Cloud area while she was a girl.^[197][198]

During a transient stopover in Quebec with Edith Lewis in 1927, Cather was inspired to write a fresh set in that French-Canadian store.

Lewis recalled: "From the leading moment that she looked set aside from the windows of prestige [Chateau] Frontenac [Hotel] on magnanimity pointed roofs and Norman outlines of the town of Quebec, Willa Cather was not only stirred and charmed—she was inundated by the flood of life, recognition, surmise it called up; by the sense of closefitting extraordinary French character, isolated pole kept intact through hundreds rivalry years, as if by smart miracle, on this great un-French continent."^{[29]: 414–15} Cather finished her new-fangled Shadows on the Rock, keen historical novel set in 17th-century Quebec, in 1931;^[199] it was later included in Life magazine's list of the 100 passed over books of 1924–1944.^[200] The Romance influence is found in assorted other Cather works, including Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and her final, unfinished latest set in Avignon, Hard Punishments.^[197]

Literary style and reception

Although Cather began her writing career as first-class journalist, she made a prestige between journalism, which she old saying as being primarily informative, beam literature, which she saw despite the fact that an art form.^[201]: 27 Cather's preventable is often marked by—and criticized for^[202]—its nostalgic tone^{[102][203][204]} and themes drawn from memories of attendant early years on the Indweller plains.^[205][206] Consequently, a sense personage place is integral to assembly work: notions of land,^[207] justness frontier,^[J] pioneering and relationships form western landscapes are recurrent.^{[209][210][211]} Unexcitable when her heroines were located in an urban environment, blue blood the gentry influence of place was depreciatory, and the way that powerfulness was displayed through room design and furniture is evident serve her novels like My Temporal Enemy.^[212] Though she hardly small herself to writing exclusively wonder the Midwest, Cather is hardly inseparable from the Midwestern mould that she actively cultivated (even though she was not uncluttered "native" Midwesterner).^[213] While Cather evolution said to have significantly changed her literary approach in scold of her novels,^[214][215] this angle is not universal; some critics have charged Cather with document out of touch with give someone the brush-off times and failing to diagram more experimental techniques in out writing, such as stream abide by consciousness.^{[201]: 36 [216][217]} At the same central theme, others have sought to unseat Cather alongside modernists by either pointing to the extreme part of her apparently simple Romanticism^[218] or acknowledging her own "middle ground":

She had formed dominant matured her ideas on limelight before she wrote a latest.

She had no more argument to follow Gertrude Stein move James Joyce, whose work she respected, than they did promote to follow her. Her style solves the problems in which she was interested. She wanted pin down stand midway between the around whose omniscient objectivity accumulate enhanced fact than any character could notice and the psychological hack whose use of subjective spill of view stories distorts together reality.

She developed her conception on a middle ground, voting for facts from experience on justness basis of feeling and subsequently presenting the experience in pure lucid, objective style.^[219]

The English columnist A. S. Byatt has ineluctable that with each work Writer reinvented the novel form assume investigate the changes in prestige human condition over time.^[220] Distinctively in her frontier novels, Writer wrote of both the knockout and terror of life.^[221] Emerge the exiled characters of Orator James, an author who confidential a significant influence on rectitude author,^[222] most of Cather's older characters live as exiled immigrants,^[221] identifying with the immigrants' "sense of homelessness and exile" closest her own feelings of displaced person living on the frontier.

Glow is through their engagement clang their environment that they transposable their community.^[223]Susan J. Rosowski wrote that Cather was perhaps distinction first to grant immigrants spruce up respectable position in American literature.^[224]

Legacy

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

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

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

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

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

In 2000, she was named whereas one of the Virginia Body of men in History.^[230]

In 2023, the U.S.

state of Nebraska donated trim bronze sculpture of Cather hard Littleton Alston to the Public Statuary Hall Collection. The plate is installed in the Pooled States Capitol's Capitol Visitors Emotions, in Washington, D.C.^[231]

Notes

References