Willa Cather Willa Sibert Cather Was Born

Willa Cather Willa Sibert Cather was born in Winchester, Virginia, in the year 1873. She lived in Virginia until she turned nine years old at which point she moved to the Nebraska prairie, to the borough of Catherton, which bore her familial namesake because so many members of Cather's family already lived here. This move to the prairie and her subsequent period of growing to adulthood on the prairie would be extremely influential in her later life and writing.

Indeed, even when she was working as an editor in New York City, it would be the prairie that would provide her main inspiration for writing material in such novels as o Pioneers! And My Antonia. Although, as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, her beginnings may seem quite humble, indeed, nonetheless, she achieved much in the subsequent years following the end of her childhood.

She attended the University of Nebraska, graduating in the year 1895, before she moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she worked jobs as both a teacher and a journalist. It was in this latter calling where Cather would find her first and most impressive success in the world of the urban Northeastern United States.

She was hired by McClure's Magazine as an editor, and eventually she became the managing editor of the magazine and her keen editorial eye and shrewd journalistic sense enabled her to save "the magazine from financial disaster" (Brown and Edel). After the success of her first several books, Cather was eventually able to leave McClure's in the second decade of the Twentieth Century and devote herself full-time to her writing.

It is at this point that Cather wrote her two most famous novels detailing prairie life, O Pioneers! And My Antonia and very much began to make her name for herself as a writer. While much of her work is known for it focus on and dissection of the intricacies and simplicity in the struggle for existence on the harsh and beautiful prairies of North America, Cather, later in her life, did also experiment with other important styles of writing.

She took on several historical subjects in later novels, such as Death Comes for the Archbishop, which dealt with the colonial times in what would later become New Mexico, and Shadow of the Rock, in which she choose Quebec in the 1600s as the subject for her work. Cather's impressive, lyrical novels, which retain an inimitable American-ness at their very core, remain some of the best examples of twentieth century American literature.

Although Willa Cather died in 1947 at the age of 1970, her legacy has continued to live on and she will continue to be remembered as one of the most important and influential writers that America has ever seen. Among the biographical themes that must be dealt with in considering her work critically, there are factors beyond her background. Indeed, as a woman living in a world that was not necessarily open to female advancement, Cather provides an extremely strong and impressive model.

Aside from this, though, her recent critics have started to deal more with the issue of her homosexuality and how that might have been an influence on her own work: In 1922, Cather declared that the power and quality of art arise from "the inexplicable presence of the thing not named," from "whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there." For decades, this remark in "The Novel Demeuble" was interpreted strictly in aesthetic terms as a statement of Cather's commitment to classical principles of starkness and simplification in art.

Recently, however, the psychosexual implications of "the thing not named" have moved into the foreground, as biographers and critics have begun to grapple with how Cather's lesbianism, a fact of her life long ignored or denied, may have shaped both the form and the content of her writing.

Cather, Willa (1873-1947)) While the knowledge of Cather's own sexuality is certainly not in the least necessary for an appreciation of the profound art to be found within the pages of her novels, nevertheless knowledge of her own sexuality can enrich the reading of her works and clarify some of her tendencies can be explained. In the novel, My Antonia, for example, certain characteristics of the book can be explained by or at least are thrown into a more interesting relief by considering this fact.

For example, the weakness of males in the book or the tendency to portray women, notable Antonia, as emblematic of an entire time and place make larger sense within this context and framework than without it. Nonetheless, however, Cather was, most of the time, able to achieve an impressive creative androgyny in her work, bringing to life exceptionally realistic men and women in her novels of prairie life.

In her two most important novels about the prairie, O Pioneers! And My Antonia, Willa Cather shows the profound and central role that place plays in her perception of the world. Indeed, in her novels, people and memories are inextricably tied to place and in these novels we see that characters who become disconnected from this homeland are typically also divorced from their cherished memories of the past.

Indeed, considering that Cather was writing of her prairie memories from the distant remove of New York City, one might be inclined to read a biographical element in this longing. Indeed, she, like her character Jim Burden, for example, has been taken away from the simple prairie of her childhood, where so many of her most important and formative memories were developed.

Indeed, however, Cather also often spoke of the importance of the ability of the artist to place herself in a supportive community, and it would be easy to see that, while by living in New York she was divorced from the golden memories of her childhood, she was nonetheless able to find a creative environment in which people were more open and accepting of her creative endeavors.

Regardless, place is the prime factor in these novels, which very much established Cather's reputation as one of America's greatest writers of all time, and, whether or not it is fair, since she wrote so many novels on other subjects as well, it is for these novels about the Nebraska prairie that she is most well-regarded.

Perhaps this is because these prairie novels seem the most uniquely American since they describe a specific time in place in the development of America as it moved from an expanding country that constantly pushed its own frontiers outward into one of the most powerful and impressive nations upon earth. In this way, Cather's novels are now of profound historical interest, because they act as a sort of historical document, capturing one of the most interesting areas in America at a crucial time in its historical development.

In Cather's novels, place and character are always strongly allied. She details people who live off the land through farming and whose lives and emotional well-being are similarly connected to the land.

In this way, she equates people with the land around them, seeing a sort of harmony between them that many of those who live in cities could never feel in quite the same fashion: When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide, Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her.

For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before.

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman. Cather O. Pioners! Chapter 5) Here, Cather explicitly links the land and human emotions, suggesting that each is dependent upon the other. Here it is the land that evokes this emotional response in its massive sublimity, but at the same time, she also states that the land is "bending" to a "human will." In this sense we see that the two are dependent on each other in one large cycle of feedback.

Indeed, perhaps her most profound statement on this matter is to suggest that the "history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman," which most powerfully equates the topography of the land with the topography of the heart. Here, Cather suggests that human emotions are capable of shaping the landscape just as profoundly as the landscape can shape human emotions. Indeed, Cather's characters enjoy an almost symbiotic relationship with the land on which they live.

She continues this theme in her great novel, My Antonia, as well. In the novel, My Antonia, Jim Burden and his companion who talks to them on the train discuss the importance of growing up on the prairie to the rest of their lives. They agree that, for them, growing up on the prairie was such a unique experience that it is completely ineffable and that one can only understand it by having lived through it.

Nonetheless, their memory of the land and the time of their childhoods are completely symbolized by one person in particular, Antonia: During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had known long ago and whom both of us admired. More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood.

To speak her name was to call up pictures of people and places, to set a quiet drama going in one's brain. I had lost sight of her altogether, but Jim had found her again after long years, had renewed a friendship that meant a great deal to him, and out of his busy life had set apart time enough to enjoy that friendship. Cather My Antonia Introduction) Here again we see the profound link between people and the land.

Here Cather shows that the entirety of a place and time can be said to reside wholly in the person of Antonia. Like in O Pioneers! In which she discusses the effect of the human heart on the Great Divide, My Antonia demonstrates the link between the characters' memories of Antonia and their memories of childhood itself. Indeed, she is linked not only to a place, but to a time as well, to the golden days of Jim Burden's childhood.

Indeed, later in the book, Cather identifies Antonia with the entire cycle of fertility itself.

When Jim, as a much older adult, goes back to visit Antonia, who is now married and has several children, he realizes that, even despite her increased age, she still reminds him of the goodness and vigor of his childhood years: She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things.

She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. Cather My Antonia Chapter 5) Again, Cather identifies Antonia with nature, with the land.

But here, in specifically identifying her with the harvest, she reveals an even deeper connection that she is making between Antonia and fertility and rebirth. Here Antonia is equated with the harvest, with the possibility of creation in the world. This is underscored by her role as a mother as well, which this section of the novel very much emphasizes.

Thus, Cather shows that in her prairie novels in particularly, the land and the people are deeply interlinked with one another in ways that cannot be understood by those who never grew up on the prairie. Perhaps part of the importance of this link stems from the struggle that those on the prairie underwent in order to survive and eventually thrive and this closeness to the land and to landscape is ultimately what is responsible for creating this intensely intimate bond between them.

Not surprisingly, then, reviewers have noted that Cather herself seemed to share this connection with the land, herself, and found it equally important to her own psychology and in her own personal process of creation.

At one point while drafting My Antonia, some critics have noted that she attempted in some small way to recreate the landscape that inspired her: James Woodress reports that Willa Cather wrote Book II ("The Hired Girls") of My antonia -- a portrait drawn from her early memories in Red Cloud, Nebraska-in a tent pitched in an open meadow outside of Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

To refresh herself after each writing session, she took long sojourns on Mount Monadnock and through the surrounding countryside (286)....Cather's living and working spaces in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, far from her childhood home, served as a re-creation of her Nebraska "parish" transplanted into the world. Briggs) Here, we can see the personal collection that Cather felt between the landscape and herself. Indeed, Willa Cather was an extremely private person and throughout her life was extremely hesitant to give interviews and even forbid the publication of her private.