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.
My Antonia [Everyman's Library edition]
My Antonia [Everyman's Library edition]
Of Ántonia, the passionate and majestic central character in Willa Cather’s greatest novel, the narrator, Jim Burden, says that she left “images in the mind that did not fade–that grew stronger with time.” The same is true of the book in which Cather enshrines her heroine.
On one level, My Ántonia is a straight forward narrative, written in limpid prose of uncanny descriptive accuracy, about the struggles endured by a family of immigrant pioneers and the small community that surrounds them on the unsettled Nebraska plains. On another, it is a novel that represents a perfect marriage of form and feeling.
In its magnificent tableaux of human beings caught in the toils of an abundant and overpowering natural world, and in the quiet, understated sympathy it displays for life of every sort, My Ántonia is a novel that effortlessly encompasses history and wilderness and the destiny of the individual–even as it lovingly and unsentimentally portrays a woman whose robust spirit and enduring warmth make her emblematic of what Cather most admired in the American people.