Willa Sibert Cather was born in Back Creek, Virginia in 1873, but
moved with her family to Red Cloud, Nebraska at the age of ten. Red
Cloud was a small town in the midst of rough prairie, and the settlers who
inhabited the town were mainly Scandinavian, Bohemian, and French immigrants
trying to cultivate the obstinate land. "Americans" were a minority. This
childhood environment greatly influenced Cather’s life as an artist and
became one of the main resources from which she extracted her vivid
depictions of character and setting. It oriented her toward the land, the
immigrants and Europe – in short, toward the essence of American pioneer
experience.
Willa Cather received no formal schooling as a child.
However, when she was about age ten, her family moved from Virginia to a
farm near Red Cloud, Nebraska, and the experiences that followed proved to
be as integral to her "education" as the more formal schooling which came
later in her life. After her family moved to the town of Red Cloud, she
attended high school there and was tutored by a store clerk in Greek and
Latin.
In 1895, she graduated from
University of Nebraska in Lincoln and thus became one of the very few women
at that time to achieve a
college education. Her studies had led her toward a creative life and career
– she had composed several short stories as well as worked for the Nebraska
Journal writing reviews of books, plays and music. After graduating, Cather
continued along the same lines and took an editorial job at a magazine in
Pittsburg until five years later, when she started teaching high school
English. She did not give up her creative work, though. While teaching Willa
Cather published her first literary work – April Twilights (1903), a book of
poetry, and a collection of short stories, The Troll Garden (1905).
In 1906, she moved to New York City to work as editor of the famous
McClure’s magazine. Here, in 1908, she met the New England regional writer,
Sarah Orne Jewett, who was to become her lifelong friend. With her quiet
celebration of life on the land, Sarah Orne Jewett was probably also one of
the main influences on Cather’s art. Willa Cather published her first novel,
Alexander’s Bridge, in 1912. She was 40 years old at the time and felt ready
to enter the literary scene. Her next three novels, O Pioneers! (1913), The
Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918), shared a common theme of
heroic womanhood in the face of great hardship, and they firmly established
her as an important writer on the American literary scene. She had started
on the path that would place her among the most important modernist women
writers.
Cather never had any romantic
interest in men – her emotional life centered around women. Whether lesbian
or not, which is a question greatly debated, her estrangement from
conventional sexuality and sex roles is a major underlying theme in most of
her writings and it shapes many of her main characters. In her personal
life, Cather lived with Edith Lewis, another Nebraskan which she had met in
1903, from 1908 until her death in 1947.
Willa Cather is one of the most
interesting women writers in American literary history. Both a teacher, a
journalist and a critic as well as a writer, Cather plays an important part
in the shaping of American modernist thought and writings.