During this time, she published two books- April Twilights (1903), a volume of poetry, and The Troll Garden (1905), a story collection. The experience of being uprooted and coming to terms with an unfamiliar landscape was a crucial one for Cather, later documented in her novel My Ántonia.Īfter graduating from the University of Nebraska in 1895, Cather moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to work as an English teacher and journalist for Home Monthly. When young Wilella was nine, Cather’s family followed other relatives to the Nebraska prairie, where they settled in Red Cloud, Nebraska. The family had a sheep farm in the Shenandoah Valley. Cather later took the middle name Sibert, after her maternal grandmother. Wilella Cather was born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia, north of Winchester, on December 7, 1873, to Charles Fectigue Cather, a deputy sheriff and farmer, and Mary Virginia Boak Cather, a teacher. Sapphira is considered to be in part autobiographical-the novel’s slave-owning family and their abolitionist daughter were all based on Cather’s maternal relatives-and her writing required a return to Virginia near the end of her life. And her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), takes place around her native Winchester, Virginia. Her masterpiece, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), is set in both New Mexico and France.
Cather wrote memorably about New York City, where she worked as a writer and as managing editor for McClure’s magazine. Cather won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her novel One of Ours, about a Nebraska farmer’s son, but her settings are not limited to the Great Plains.
Her re-creation of what is now the Midwest is rooted in her own family’s experience moving west from the Shenandoah Valley in 1883, and her writing is preoccupied with the larger American experiment of uprooting and then re-establishing civilization. Willa Cather was a Virginia-born modernist writer who is best known for O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), two novels about Nebraska, where she attended school and spent much of her childhood.
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