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.
Willa Cather: Later Novels
Willa Cather: Later Novels
This Library of America volume collects six novels by Willa Cather, who is among the most accomplished American writers of the twentieth century. Their formal perfection and expansiveness of feeling are an expression of Cather’s dedication both to art and to the open spaces of America.
A Lost Lady (1923) exemplifies her principle of conciseness. It concerns a woman of uncommon loveliness and grace who lends an aura of sophistication to a frontier town, and explores the hidden passions and desires that confine those who idealize her. The recurrent conflict in Cather’s work between frontier culture and an encroaching commercialism is nowhere more powerfully articulated.
The Professor’s House (1925) encapsulates a story within a story. In the framing narrative, Professor St. Peter, a prizewinning historian of the early Spanish explorers, finds himself disillusioned with family, career, even the house that reflects his success. Within this story is another, of St. Peter’s friend Tom Outland, whose brief but adventurous life still shadows those he loved.
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) tells the story of the first bishop of New Mexico in a series of tableaux modeled on the medieval lives of the saints. Cather affectionately portrays the refined French Bishop Latour and his more earthy assistant within the harsh and beautiful landscape of the Southwest and among the Mexicans, Indians, and settlers they were sent to serve.
Shadows on the Rock (1931), though its setting and subject are unusual for Cather, expresses her fascination with the “curious endurance of a kind of culture, narrow but definite.” It is a re-creation of seventeenth-century Québec as it appears to the apothecary Auclaire and his daughter Cécile: the town’s narrow streets, the supply ships on its great river, its merchants, profligates, explorers, missionaries, and towering personalities like Frontenac and Laval, all parts of a colony struggling to survive.
Lucy Gayheart (1935) returns to the themes of Cather’s earlier writings, in a more somber key. Talented, spontaneous, and eager to explore the possibilities of life, Lucy leaves her prairie home to pursue a career in music. After a happy interval, her life takes an increasingly disastrous turn.
Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) marks a triumphant conclusion to Cather’s career as a novelist. Set in Virginia five years before the Civil War, the story shows the effects of slaveholding on Sapphira Colbert, a woman of spirit and common sense who is frighteningly capricious in dealing with people she “owns,” and on her husband, who hates slavery even while he conforms to the social order that permits it. When through kindness he refuses to sell a slave, Sapphira’s jealous reaction precipitates a sequence of events that registers a conflict of cultural as well as personal values.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.