Willa Cather
Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 - April 24, 1947) was born near Winchester, Virginia, but before she was ten she had the good fortune of moving with her family to Nebraska. In the small town of Red Cloud she encountered formal schooling and had access to the fine library of family friends — and she began writing. She never stopped. She graduated from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, In pursuit of her journalistic career she moved to Pittsburgh in 1896, where she also did high school teaching and began to write short stories. In 1906 she moved to New York City to work for McClure’s Magazine, one of the premier comprehensive magazines of the day, famous for its support of investigative journalism. In 1912 she published her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge.
In five years she published three novels that set high standards for herself and for 20th Century American literature: O, Pioneers (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Antonia (1918). The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction that she won in 1923 for One of Ours seemed like a retrospective apology and recognition to her for eminence in contemporary letters. In the 20s and 30s her high profile provided a target for envious, mostly male, writers, and she endured controversy and critical vendettas as she continued writing. Time and perspective have provided no better answers to her critics than The Professor’s House (1925), Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), and Shadows on the Rock (1931). Two more novels and two more collections of short fiction followed until her death in 1947, and the year following saw another collection of short fiction.
Cather inherited the battles of women writers of the 19th Century — Harriet Beecher Stowe comes immediately to mind, but many other fine and important writers make fine company: Constance Fenimore Woolson, Mary Johnston, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Cather’s friend Sarah Orne Jewett. Edith Wharton was a senior contemporary, and Ellen Glasgow, another Virginian, paralleled her life. Since World War II Cather’s reputation and the estimation of her achievement has slowly and steadily risen through fashions and fads, trends and tastes. She is timeless now, a state of being she would understand.
Lucy Gayheart
Lucy Gayheart
In this haunting 1935 novel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of My Ántonia performs crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction: the impermanence of innocence, the opposition between prairie and city, provincial American values and world culture, and the grandeur, elation, and heartache that await a gifted young woman who leaves her small Nebraska town to pursue a life in art.
At the age of eighteen, Lucy Gayheart heads for Chicago to study music. She is beautiful and impressionable and ardent, and these qualities attract the attention of Clement Sebastian, an aging but charismatic singer who exercises all the tragic, sinister fascination of a man who has renounced life only to turn back to seize it one last time. Out of their doomed love affair—and Lucy’s fatal estrangement from her origins—Willa Cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a Schubert sonata.