Willa Cather

1
Willa Cather

• 1873-1947

"Restlessness such as ours, success such as ours,
striving such as ours, do not make for beauty.
Other things must come first, good cookery,
cottages that are home, not playthings gardens,
repose." 21 December 1924
2
Life

• Cather, Willa Sibert (1873-1947), American
  writer, one of the country's foremost novelists,
  whose carefully crafted prose conveys vivid
  pictures of the American landscape and the people
  it molded.
• Influenced by the prose of the American regional
  writer Sarah Orne Jewett, Cather set many of her
  works in Nebraska and the American Southwest,
  areas with which she was familiar from her
  childhood.

3
Life

• Born near Winchester, Virginia, Cather moved with
  her family to Red Cloud, Nebraska, when she was
  ten years old.
• She graduated from the University of Nebraska
  before becoming a newspaperwoman and teacher in
  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
• She moved to New York City in 1906 to work as an
  editor on McClure's Magazine.
• While editing that magazine, she wrote short
  stories to fill its pages.
• These stories, published in a collection called
  the Troll Garden in 1905, brought her to the
  attention of S.S. McClure.
• She became a member of the staff of McClure's
  Magazine and finally, its editor.
• In 1912, after five years with McClure's, she
  left the magazine to have time for her own
  writing.

4
Life

• She subsequently published her first five novels.
  
• These novels announced her themes of strong
  women, the fight against provincial life, and the
  dying of the pioneer tradition.
• This was the period of O Pioneers (1913), Song of
  the Lark (1915), My Antonia (1918), One of Ours
  (1922), and A Lost Lady (1922).
• She won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours.
• One of Ours (http//www.bartleby.com/1006/
  Pulitzer Prizewinning novel of a midwestern
  Americans journey to the front of World War I.)

5
Life

• After this prolific period, Cather entered a
  period of despair.
• It was a time, she said, when the world broke
  apart.
• Recovering from this difficult period, she wrote
  her greatest novels The Professor's House
  (1925), My Mortal Enemy (1926), Death Comes for
  the Archbishop (1927), and "Shadows on the Rock"
  (1931).
• These works are the best example of her classic
  and restrained language and her lyrical evocation
  of nature.

6
Life

• There always seemed to exist a tension in Willa
  Cather's life and, thus, in her writing.
• She was drawn to the East coast, its mountains
  and cities. And, she was drawn to the plains and
  the vastness of Nebraska.
• She loved the romantic literature of France, yet
  her own writing style was one of classic
  restraint.

7
Life

• Most of her work is autobiographical in nature,
  yet before she died she ordered her letters
  burned so no one could have access to her.
• She had a large circle of friends, yet to write
  she needed the solitude of Nebraska or New
  Hampshire.
• Red Cloud, Nebraska, her home, both attracted and
  repelled her it was also the source of her art.

8
Life

• Cather continued to write for the next 16 years,
  although she was becoming increasingly frail. She
  died in 1947.

9
A short chronicle of her life

• 1873 - December 7, Willela Sibert Cather is born
  in Back Creek Valley, Virginia.
• 1883 - She moves to Red Cloud, Nebraska with her
  parents.
• 1895 - Willa Cather graduates from The University
  of Nebraska, Lincoln.
• 1896 - She takes an editorial job at the magazine
  Home Monthly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and
  writes reviews for the Pittsburgh Leader.
• 1900 - Cather lives in Washington for a few
  months and works as a correspondent for two
  Pittsburgh magazines, and in March she returns to
  Pittsburgh, where she becomes a high school
  teacher at Central High School.
• 1902 - Willa Cather travels in Europe with
  Isabella McClung.
• 1903 - Cather publishes a book of poetry, April
  Twilights, and meets Edith Lewis.

10
chronicle

• 1905 - She publishes a collection of short
  stories The Troll Garden.
• 1906 - She moves to New York City, where she
  takes a position as managing editor of the
  McClure's magazine.
• 1908 - Cather meets and befriends New Hampshire
  regional writer Sarah Orne Jewett,  who becomes a
  great inspiration for her later works. She also
  begins to share an apartment with Edith Lewis,
  and they live together until her death.
• 1912 - Publication of her first novel -
  Alexander's Bridge.
• 1913 - O Pioneers! is published.
• 1915 - The Song of the Lark is published.
• 1918 - My ?tonia is published.
• 1920 - The short story collection Youth and the
  Bright Medusa is published.

11
chronicle

• 1922 - Cather publishes One of Ours for which
  she receives the Pulitzer Prize for fiction from
  Columbia University Graduate School of
  Journalism. She also joins the Episcopal Church
  and her literary focus alters considerably. She
  later writes that in this year, the world broke
  in two for her.
• 1923 - A Lost Lady is published.
• 1925 - The Professor's House is published.
• 1926 - Death Comes for the Archbishop and My
  Mortal Enemy are published.
• 1930 - Willa Cather gets the Howells Medal from
  the American Academy and Institute of Arts and
  Letters for Death Comes for the Archbishop.

12
chronicle

• 1931 - Shadows on the Rock is published.
• 1932 - The collection of short stories Obscure
  Destinies is published. It includes the story
  Neighbour Rosicky. Furthermore, she receives the
  Prix Femina Americaine for distinguished literary
  accomplishment.
• 1935 - Lucy Gayheart is published.
• 1936 - The essay collection Not under Forty is
  published.
• 1938 - Sapphira and the slave Girl is published.
• 1944 - She receives the Gold Medal of the
  National Institute of Arts and Letters.
• 1947 - April 24, Willa Cather dies and is buried
  in New Hampshire.

13
Works

• Her fiction is unique in its powerful
  representation of setting and character and rich
  in its language and imagery. Her style of writing
  is condensed and subtle, but nonetheless
  tremendously expressive.
• A quote
• "Whatever is felt upon the page without being
  specifically named there--that, we may say, is
  created."

14
Quote

• If a joyous elephant should break forth into
  song, his lay would probably be very much like
  Whitmans famous Song of Myself. It would have
  just about as much delicacy and deftness and
  discrimination.
• Willa Cather (18731947), U.S. novelist.
  originally published in the Nebraska State
  Journal (Jan. 19. 1896). repr. In The World and
  the Parish Willa Cathers Articles and Reviews,
  1893-1902, vol. 1, ed. William M. Curtin,
  University of Nebraska Press (1970). Written
  four years after Whitmans death, Cathers
  commentary also acknowledges that there is a
  primitive elemental force about him that she
  finds appealing.

15
Quote

• Art is a concrete and personal and rather
  childish thing after allno matter what people do
  to graft it into science and make it sociological
  and psychological it is no good at all unless it
  is let alone to be itselfa game of make-believe,
  or re-production, very exciting and delightful to
  people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.
• Willa Cather (18731947), U.S. novelist. Light
  on Adobe Walls, Willa Cather on Writing,
  University of Nebraska Press (1988).

16
Quote

• ...what a thing it is to lie there all day in the
  fine breeze, with the pine needles dropping on
  one, only to return to the hotel at night so
  hungry that the dinner, however homely, is a
  fete, and the menu finer reading than the best
  poetry in the world! Yet we are to leave all this
  for the glare and blaze of Nice and Monte Carlo
  which is proof enough that one cannot become
  really acclimated to happiness.
• Willa Cather (18761947), U.S. novelist. Willa
  Cather in Europe, ch. 13 (1956). Written on
  September 10, 1902 on her first trip to France,
  while stopping in the village of Cavalaire, which
  consisted of a station house and a little tavern
  by the roadside.

17
Quote

• If the writer achieves anything noble, anything
  enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely
  to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his
  great gift is the fine thing in him that alone
  can make his work fine.
• Willa Cather (18731947), U.S. novelist.
  originally published in The Best Stories of Sarah
  Orne Jewett (1925) repr. In Willa Cather on
  Writing. The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett,
  preface, University of Nebraska Press (1988).

18
Quote

• Every artist knows that there is no such thing as
  freedom in art. The first thing an artist does
  when he begins a new work is to lay down the
  barriers and limitations he decides upon a
  certain composition, a certain key, a certain
  relation of creatures or objects to each other.
  He is never free, and the more splendid his
  imagination, the more intense his feeling, the
  farther he goes from general truth and general
  emotion.
• Willa Cather (18731947), U.S. novelist. Light
  on Adobe Walls, Willa Cather on Writing,
  University of Nebraska Press (1988).

19
Works

• From her college years on, Cather wrote short
  stories and poetry her first published book was
  a collection of verse, April Twilights (1903)
  her first published prose was a group of stories,
  The Troll Garden (1905).
• Not until 1913, however, after having written her
  first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912), and
  having resigned from McClure's, did Cather devote
  herself solely to writing.
• Her subsequent novels, O Pioneers! (1913), The
  Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918),
  depict the resolute, dignified life of immigrant
  farm families on the Great Plains, in contrast to
  that of the native-born town dwellers.

20
Works

• In these works Cather is noted for her skills in
  evoking the pioneer spirit.
• Cather also used the prairie setting in her
  novels One of Ours (1922 Pulitzer Prize, 1923)
  and A Lost Lady (1923).
• In these books her theme is the contrast between
  encroaching urbanization and the achievements of
  the pioneers.

21
Works

• She also continued to create strong, determined
  female characters, many of whom encounter
  difficulty relating to a society that expects
  women to be dependent on others.
• In Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927),
  considered by some critics to be Cather's
  greatest novel, she deals with the missionary
  experiences of a Roman Catholic bishop among the
  Native Americans of New Mexico.

22
Works

• Several trips through the Southwest provided the
  stimulus for this work, as well as for sections
  of The Professor's House (1925) and The Song of
  the Lark.
• As early as 1909, however, in her haunting short
  story The Enchanted Bluff, the mesas and the
  ancient people who had dwelt there had captured
  Cather's imagination.

23
Works

• In Shadows on the Rock (1931) Cather went further
  afield to describe French Roman Catholic life in
  17th-century Québec.
• Cather's last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl,
  was published in 1940.

24
My Antonia (1918) http//www.unl.edu/Cather/works/
se/antonia/entire/index.htm

• The novel chronicles and celebrates the simple
  heroism of a woman who survives childhood poverty
  and adolescent seduction to marry and settle down
  as wife and mother on a Nebraska farm.

25
My Antonia (1918)

• The story is mainly seen from the point of
  view of the narrator, Jim Burden, who met
  Antonia, when he as an orphaned 10-year-old came
  to live with his grand parents on the Divide.
• In the novel, he looks back on the course
  of events that shaped her life and made her the
  woman she is.

26
My Antonia (1918)

• Cather later stated that she saw Antonia as
  the embodiment of all her feelings about the
  early immigrants on the prairie.
• The novel thus intertwines nostalgia for the
  history of the American West with the harsh
  realities of pioneer life.

27
O Pioneers! (1913) http//www.unl.edu/Cather/works
/se/pioneers/entire/index.htm

• Alexandra Bergson is the daughter and oldest
  child of Swedish immigrants in Nebraska.
• Her father, on his deathbed, leaves her in charge
  of the family and the land.

28
O Pioneers! (1913)

• During the hard times that follow a few years
  later, her brothers want to leave the land, but
  Alexandra refuses to go against her promise to
  her father.

29
O Pioneers! (1913)

• She fights to keep the farm and make it
  prosperous and she turns out to be one of the few
  with enough strength and vision to succeed as a
  farmer on the vast plains that are so different
  from the comfortable farms of Europe.

30
O Pioneers! (1913)

• Her lonely struggle to tame the wild land is
  compounded because as an independent woman she
  evokes fear and resentment from the other settles
  and especially from her own brothers.

31
O Pioneers! (1913)

• Aside from the portrayal of heroic womanhood, a
  predominant theme of O Pioneers! is the clash
  between old values of simple faith, individuality
  and integrity associated with early pioneer life,
  and the new gods of money and conformity in
  modern society.
• The title is taken from Walt Whitmans "Pioneers!
  O Pioneers".

32
Links

• Willa Cather Scholarly Edition http//www.unl.edu/
  Cather/works/se/index.htm
• The Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational
  Foundation has been working since 1955 to
  preserve the places in and around Red Cloud which
  figured prominently in her novels and short
  stories. http//www.willacather.org/
• The Willa Cather Electronic Archive
  http//icg.harvard.edu/cather/
• An introduction to the life and writings of Willa
  Cather http//fp.image.dk/fpemarxlind/