An AOIT web page assignment created by David Jenkins

Catcher attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, graduating in 1895. While a student, she became a theater critic and columnist for the Nebraska State Journal and the Lincoln Courier. Her experience in journalism and criticism took her first to Pittsburgh and then to New York, where she served as managing editor for McClure's Magazine. During her tenure, she met Sarah Orne Jewett who encouraged the writer to develop her own voice with her own materials. In 1913, Catcher delivered, publishing O Pioneers!, a novel which celebrates the pioneering spirit of Swedish farmers on the plains of Nebraska. She followed this with The Song of the Lark (1915) and My Ántonia (1918), both novels epic treatments of heroic immigrant women.

Lincoln, the state capital, was not a large city by any absolute standard when Catcher got off the train at the Burlington depot in September 1890. But it was eighteen times the size of Red Cloud and by comparison a metropolis. She never had lived in a city, and the prospect was exciting. Although she was later to evoke the soil of Webster County in unforgettable prose, she took to the city life avidly, and later when the chance came to move on to Pittsburgh, she did not hesitate. Still later she moved on to New York with the same alacrity and made her home there for the rest of her life. Lincoln, however, was her first encounter with urban life.

The Nebraska capital then had a population of thirty-five thousand sprawled over several square miles of flat, open prairie in the typical mid-western pattern of city planning: perfectly rectangular blocks laid out by theodolite and surveyors' chains in a north south, east west grid. Lettered streets ran east and west, numbered streets north and south. The capitol building stood at the center, and a mile north, at the top of Eleventh Street were the buildings of the university. By the time Catcher arrived, eight miles of streets had been paved with red cedar blocks and brick; the inhabitants had ridden in horse cars for seven years, had possessed a waterworks for five, gas streetlights for four; and the telephone company had 615 subscribers. The first skyscraper, the six story Burr Block, was finished the year before Catcher came; there were five major hotels, about as many saloons as churches, five private schools, a public library, and an electric light plant. Shade trees had had a quarter of a century to establish themselves, but the city still had a raw look about it. Outside of town there were people still lining in dugouts, and some years when the grasshopper plague hit the neighboring farms, the insects stripped the young trees of the city. The smell of burning prairie grass often drifted over the city before it was replaced by progress and industrial fumes as the city grew.

Catcher had a long writing career, over which she became nationally acclaimed and internationally respected. She is most remembered for My Ántonia, A Lost Lady (1923) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).  My Ántonia and A Lost Lady are structured around central female characters, Ántonia, a Bohemian immigrant, and Marian Forrester, wife of a prestigious townsman. In the end, these women become emblematic of the past Ántonia represents the country, the conditions, and the whole adventure of childhood which the narrator wants to recapture. Likewise, Mrs. Forrester signals the end of the past: her husband, aging and helpless, recalls the age of the railroad pioneers, the men of big business dreams, now defunct. Marian, however, changes to accommodate the new order; thereby surviving.Cather evoked not only the Nebraska plains but also the history and topography of the southwest. In Death Comes for the Archbishop, she recounted the story of French Catholic missionaries settling New Mexico and Colorado. This novel was an instant critical success, earning the reputation of an "American classic."

Catcher received the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours. She was given honorary degrees from Yale, Princeton and Berkeley, and was awarded the Prix Femina American by the French for her depiction of French culture within North America. Her writing earned her the cover of Time Magazine as well as the gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Catcher wrote, "There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before." Her ability to tap into these fundamental human stories keeps readers passionately engaged with her fiction.

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Near the end of her career in 1940 Catcher must have seemed to many of her admirers something like a national monument. For thirty-five years she had been engaged in building an oeuvre that had eventually challenged the accomplishments of the greatest of Americans. The tone of her last interviewers, Stephen and Rosemary Benet in the New York Herald Tribune, is awed and reverential. In summing up her life and work a week after Sapphira appeared, the Benets began with an assumption: this is a genuine artist: "Like fine silver or porcelain, her product is unmistakable. We do not have to turn the piece to find the hallmark or the crown and crossed swords imprint. We know by the look and the shape and the weight in hand." They could not decide in their analysis just what made the artist, from whence came the creative gift, but they knew that with Catcher they were looking at the real thing. As a person and artist, they concluded, “she is very civilized and very American."

Cather's pleasure in the enthusiastic response to her novel was tempered by physical problems and the ever grimmer news coming out of Europe. Knopf, who had the habit of bringing out special printings of his books for collectors, sent Catcher five hundred sheets to sign for the first issue of the first edition. This chore, which she had to do in three days, proved a disaster, for it inflamed the tendon of her right thumb, and again she had to have her hand in splints and her arm in a sling, as she had six years before. The problem was more serious this time, however, as it was her right hand. She spent the Christmas season in the French Hospital undergoing treatment for this problem, and later an orthopedic surgeon from Boston made her a special brace that she had to wear off and on for the rest of her life. Yehudi Menuhin went to the hospital to comfort her, and the French Hospital turned out to Bethe pleasantest place she ever had been laid up in. She stayed several weeks. The rooms had glorious light and sun, no ugly furniture, and she could hear French spoken all day. It was the only hospital she ever was in where she could eat the food. But by the end of February she still was in splints and unable to write. At times she could not even sign her name, and her dictated letters were signed by Sarah Bloom, her secretary.

Major portions of the above text were directly copied from public domain documents found on the internet.
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