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.
Shadows on the Rock
Shadows on the Rock
Willa Cather’s novel of seventeenth-century Quebec is a luminous evocation of North American origins, and of the men and women who struggled to adapt to a new world even as they clung to the artifacts and manners of one they left behind.
In 1697, Quebec is an island of French civilization perched on a bare gray rock amid a wilderness of trackless forests. For many of its settlers, Quebec is a place of exile, so remote that an entire winter passes without a word from home. But to twelve-year-old Cécile Auclair, the rock is home, where even the formidable Governor Frontenac entertains children in his palace and beavers lie beside the lambs in a Christmas créche. As Cather follows this devout and resourceful child over the course of a year, she re-creates the continent as it must have appeared to its first European inhabitants. And she gives us a spellbinding work of historical fiction in which great events occur first as rumors and then as legends—and in which even the most intimate domestic scenes are suffused with a sense of wonder.