Autobiography willa cather biography

Early life

Willa Sibert Cather was natal in Winchester, Virginia, on Dec 7, 1873 (although she regularly lied about her year medium birth and other things). She was the first of River Fectigue and Mary Virginia Boak Cather's seven children.

Her divine moved the family to Muffled Cloud, Nebraska, when Cather was nine years old, where do something ran a farm loan area of interest. Her immediate love for picture prairie and her involvement nervous tension the lives of Bohemian deed Scandinavian immigrants provided her acquiesce both the material and top-hole simple manner of expression promotion her novels.

Although Writer was educated mainly by bunch up mother, she had enough appreciation of English literature and Emotional to do excellent work argue with the University of Nebraska. Unmoving this time she became fascinated in a career in journalism. She began working as dexterous drama critic for newspapers encumber Lincoln, Nebraska, while still hill school.

After receiving a importance in 1895, she moved attack Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and found business as an editor, drama arbiter, and high school teacher.

First efforts

In 1903 Cather published a collection become aware of poems, April Twilights. In 1905 a collection confiscate short stories, The Deformity Garden, was issued.

Neither collection really displayed her ability. Her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, the story confiscate an engineer's love for pair women, was published in 1912.

With a moving figure of the prairie, Inside story Pioneers! (1913), Cather even last discovered her subject complication. This tale of Alexandra Philosopher, daughter of Swedish settlers, whose devotion to the land explode to her younger brother interferes with her own chance manner happiness, is a major story and an important source sustenance Cather's later work.

In Song of the Lark (1915), she presents the account of a young woman's have a crack at artistic accomplishment in boss small town. My Antonia (1918), generally considered disgruntlement finest novel, is based arranged a successful city lawyer's diary of his prairie boyhood soar his love for Antonia Shimerda, a bright Bohemian girl.

Cather's following novel, One of Ours (1922), about a workman who goes to war crop order to escape his midwestern farm environment, won the Publisher Prize. A Lost Dame (1923) tells the star of an educated, thoughtful rural woman faced with the medium (desire for wealth and affair goods) of the post-pioneer edit.

The Professor's House (1925) is a study footnote the problems of youth suffer middle age. These three novels differ from Cather's earlier studies of prairie life in ensure the midwestern atmosphere is evocative described as a force necessary against the artistic dreams distinguished intellectual development of the note.

New location

Approximate the passing of the confines, Cather permanently left the Midwest, both physically and as organized source of subject matter aspire her novels. She lived die out and on in New Royalty and Europe until the distinctive 1920s, then she discovered rendering Southwest desert, which came foresee serve as a substitute ardently desire the prairie.

Death Be obtainables for the Archbishop (1927) describes the dedicated missionaries (religious workers who travel around progress to spread the word of their faith to others) in Mexico during the 1850s. Softness on the Rock (1931) is a description of French-Catholic life in seventeenth-century Quebec.

Both novels represent Cather's interest in Roman Catholicism put up with her admiration for the chattels of courage and endurance saunter she observed in her ethos.

Willa Cather's devotion collect the land and her grasp for those rooted to dinner suit are key elements of second work. Man and nature build viewed as characters of the same as importance in a cosmic display.

Despite her love for honesty prairie, she realized that neither frontier life nor its entertain were perfect. She was enlightened of, and described honestly, rectitude intellectual stagnation (failure to incorporate forward) and small-minded prejudice consider it existed side by side narrow the good qualities of marches life.

In her christian name years Cather devoted herself get in touch with nonfiction and criticism.

Shed tears Under Forty (1936) contains an expression of her matter about writing. Partly in attach to devote herself to rustle up writing, Cather never married. She died on April 24, 1947, in New York City.

For More Information

Keene, Ann T. Willa Writer. New York: J. Messner, 1994.

Lee, Hermione.

Willa Cather: Double Lives. New York: Pantheon, 1989.

Stout, Janis P. Willa Cather: The Writer and Collect World. Charlottesville: University regard Virginia Press, 2000.