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: The Complete Fiction and Other Writings [3 volume boxed set]
Willa Cather: The Complete Fiction and Other Writings [3 volume boxed set]
Willa Cather was one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, creating in indelible novels and stories a rich panorama of place and experience among pioneers and farmers, artists and youthful lovers, immigrants and their striving children. Here, for the first time, the definitve three-volume Library of America edition of her works is available in a collector’s boxed set, gathering all of her novels, novellas, and story collections; fourteen additional stories uncollected during her lifetime; and a selection of essays, poems, and other writings.
Included are:
Early Novels and Stories | 1,336 pages
The Troll Garden (short stories) • O Pioneers! • The Song of the Lark •
My Ántonia • One of Ours
Later Novels | 988 pages
A Lost Lady • The Professor’s House • Death Comes for the Archbishop •
Shadows on the Rock • Lucy Gayheart • Sapphira and the Slave Girl
Stories, Poems, and Other Writings | 1,039 pages
Youth and the Bright Medusa (stories) • Obscure Destinies (stories) • The Old Beauty and Others (stories) • Alexander’s Bridge • My Mortal Enemy • occasional pieces • critical essays• April Twilights and Other Poems
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.