Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Willa Cather My Antonia: Unabridged Text with Introduction, Biography and Analysis
    Willa Cather My Antonia: Unabridged Text with Introduction, Biography and Analysis
    Willa Cather My Antonia: Unabridged Text with Introduction, Biography and Analysis
    Ebook314 pages6 hours

    Willa Cather My Antonia: Unabridged Text with Introduction, Biography and Analysis

    By Willa Cather

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Willa Cather My Ántonia : Unabridged Text with Introduction, Biography and Analysis

    My Ántonia is a novel published in 1918 by American writer Willa Cather, considered one of her best works. It is the final book of her "prairie trilogy" of novels, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. The novel tells the stories of an orphaned boy from Virginia, Jim Burden, and the elder daughter in a family of Bohemian immigrants, Ántonia Shimerda, who are each brought as children to be pioneers in Nebraska towards the end of the 19th century. Both the pioneers who first break the prairie sod for farming, as well as of the harsh but fertile land itself, feature in this American novel. The first year in the very new place leaves strong impressions in both children, affecting them lifelong. This novel is considered Cather's first masterpiece. Cather was praised for bringing the American West to life and making it personally interesting.

    This edition includes the full original version of the Willa Cather's book and provides other valuable features under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, including a commented introduction, helpful bibliography, author's biography, notes, references, and much more.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBooks on Demand
    Release dateJul 3, 2018
    ISBN9782322126026
    Willa Cather My Antonia: Unabridged Text with Introduction, Biography and Analysis
    Author

    Willa Cather

    Willa Cather (1873-1947) was born in Virginia and raised on the Nebraska prairie. She worked as a newspaper writer, teacher, and managing editor of McClure's magazine. In addition to My Ántonia, her books include O Pioneers! (1913) and The Professor's House. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours.

    Read more from Willa Cather

    Related to Willa Cather My Antonia

    Related ebooks

    Sagas For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for Willa Cather My Antonia

    4/5

    2,642 ratings161 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      My Antonia by Willa Cather was well recommended to me a number of times. The last book of Cather’s Prairie Trilogy, I read the first 2 books in order to make sense of the last. So it’s taken me a number of years to finally read this book about growing up on the farms and in a small Nebraska town during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. The writing is simple and beautiful. the author’s love of the wide open spaces people by hardy Europeans shines in her every word. She has a wonderful ability to tell the stories of her characters in a comical yet compassionate way. We are in for more enjoyable adventures once Jim and his grandparents left the farm and moved to the city of Black Hawk. We quickly pass through his education and learn third hand what becomes of Antonia and others. It winds up rather quickly with a bit of sentimentality.
    • 5/5
      Wow. My first Willa Cather and I can't believe It's taken me so long. This was astonishing. Beautifully written with every open sky and blade of wind-blown grass innocently transcribed. The story feels familiar as Jim Burden is a prototypical Nick Carraway, condemned to observe, unable to effect change. I'm not the first to make the comparison and it appears that Fitzgerald judged his own work to be an inferior homage in some ways. Antonia is a tragic heroine, overflowing with life. are we supposed to be disappointed in her lack of success relative to Lena and Tiny, or, as I did, are we supposed to feel thrilled that she is married to a man who loves her and with whom she is bringing up 10 fabulous children? It doesn't matter much, I guess, but I am as captivated by Antonia as Jim.

      I look forward to reading more of Ms Cather.
    • 5/5
      It is a daunting task to find anything fresh to say about a book that is justifiably regarded as a classic, so I will keep this one fairly short. Willa Cather moved with her family from New England to rural Nebraska as a child, at a time when new farmland there was still being pioneered, so this tale of the state's development and specifically the experiences of the first generation immigrant farming families from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia that settled it, is inevitably coloured by her own experiences. She distances herself cleverly by making her narrator Jim Burden a man of her own age who for quite a large part of the book retains some distance from its heroine Ántonia, but who was also her childhood friend and neighbour.The story is beautifully paced and contains nothing superfluous. Cather's Nebraska is vividly realised and her attitudes to her characters and particularly those who fall foul of conventional moral judgments seem very modern for a book first published in 1918. For the most part she avoids sentimentality too, except perhaps a little in the final chapter, which seems forgiveable. It was also interesting to read a story that is so positive about immigration at a time when there is so much paranoia about it in popular political culture.
    • 4/5
      I managed to get through high school without reading Willa Cather. Someone recommended My Ántonia when I was looking for undramatic material suitable for reading before bedtime, and onto the wish list it went.Undramatic is an interesting label to apply to this book, which witnesses a suicide, an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, several amputations and a murder-suicide. The tone is what makes the story drowsy and golden-hued — romantic doesn't even begin to cover it. It was indeed pleasant to read before falling asleep.This novel is a good counterpoint to House of Mirth because the two novels have some shared structure — you can sense Ántonia's "downfall" approaching her as soon as she moves to town, and the narrator is occasionally exasperatingly useless (both of which remind me of House of Mirth). Cather doesn't write straight-up tragedies, however — her characters have a remarkable amount of self-determination. What could have been a fatal flaw (e.g. Lena's warmheartedness to married men) becomes a colorful personality detail. I love that the entire farming community gossips about Ole Benson following Lena around and years later Lena casually dismisses their gossip with a description of her generosity of spirit ('There was never any harm in Ole,' she said once. 'People needn't have troubled themselves. He just liked to come over and sit on the draw-side and forget about his bad luck.' [p. 226]).
    • 4/5
      Classic about Nebraska in the 1800s.
    • 5/5
      "As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running."


      This book is about the pioneer experience in Nebraska, particularly that of Eastern European immigrants, and is also the coming of age story of Jim Burden (narrator), and Ántonia. While the book is told from Jim's point of view, I felt more connected to Ántonia. Jim and Ántonia are friends from the moment they meet, and as the seasons and the landscape of Nebraska prairie change, so do Jim and Ántonia. They eventually take very different paths, but their friendship remains. Jim is a romantic, and very nostalgic about the past. Ántonia is the symbol of the past for him. I was wrapped up in his feelings of nostalgia, and longing for the past. As I was reading, I felt them too. I particularly loved his descriptions of the Nebraska prairie. 


      CAWPILE Rating:

      C- 9

      A- 10

      W- 10

      P- 6

      I- 9

      L- 10

      E- 10

      Avg= 9.1= ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

      #backtotheclassics (Classic from the Americas- includes the Caribbean)
      #mmdchallenge (a book published before you were born)
    • 4/5
      Reached back for a classic i had never read. A beautifully written book, with powerful descriptions of places, people and memories. An old-fashioned good read!
    • 5/5
      (This was read as part of my 2011 reading project, 100 Years, 100 Books, which commemorated RPL's 100th anniversary.)

      My friend Paula, a Nebraska native, has been after me to read this book for years and now I understand. I’d been spending nearly all of my reading time with early 20th century mysteries and, quite frankly, they’d become tedious. After forcing myself through The Red House by A.A. Milne, I really felt like I needed a change of pace. I had downloaded a whole bunch of free books to my Kindle for this reading project, and My Antonia just happened to be at the top of the list, so I casually opened it one night a week ago to see what it was all about.

      I found a beautiful, heartbreaking, luminous story that captivated me from the first page. Cather tells the story of Antonia Shimerda, a headstrong, handsome Bohemian girl whose family is transplanted to Black Hawk, Nebraska in the 19th century. Antonia’s story is told through the eyes of Jim Burden, an orphan who also arrives to live with his grandparents in Black Hawk on the same train as Antonia and her family. The two become fast friends whose lives twine around each other over the course of a lifetime.

      The interesting thing about this story that is so different from what I’ve been reading is that there really isn’t a storyline. This is a memoir, a re-telling of a bucolic if hard childhood on the prairie, coming of age in a small mid-western town, and adulthood not yet devoid of childhood innocence and affection between lifelong friends.

      I was reminded of two stories as I read this one – Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder and the 2010 Newbery winner Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool. The sod houses of Wilder’s early books are here, as is the red prairie grass, snakes, farms, and family devotion. The similarity to Manifest, Kansas is more in the characters drawn by Cather and Vanderpool than in the story. However, all three books share the same comforting, lovely tributes to the importance of family and friends.

      Cather’s characters, from Antonia and her regal but defeated father, to the foreign farm girls who go to town as “hired girls,” to Antonia’s husband and colorful tribe of children, to the narrator – Jim Burden himself – are finely drawn and developed with care and compassion. She captures the tender friendship between Antonia and Jim, which becomes the thread that twines through the entire story and ultimately makes it successful.

      A beautiful book that will stay with me for a long, long time.
    • 5/5
      Long ago, a grad school writing teacher recommended we read Willa Cather. It's taken me way too long to follow his advice.

      This is an exquisite novel about life on the frontier and the immigrant experience in America. But mainly about love, loss, innocence, the pain of growing up, and "how much people can mean to each other."

      The characters are passionate, beautifully drawn, yet consistently surprising. Cather's technique is indirect, or as she called it "unfurnished." What's left out is often more important than what's stated. The reader is left to interpret the meaning and importance of ambiguous actions and feelings.

      It used to said that the late 19th Century was the Golden Age of the Novel. But I think it was the first two decades of the 20th Century when the form reached its zenith. That's when Joyce, Lawrence, and Conrad were writing books with unprecedented technical brilliance and psychological depth. In her quiet, understated way, Willa Cather was doing the same.
    • 5/5
      My Antonia is a wonderfully evocative novel of the early settlement of the Great Plains seen through the life of a well rounded, "living" character. A novel that will sweep the reader away while it lasts.
    • 4/5
      Our narrator, Jim Burden, reminisces about growing up in Nebraska with a young Bohemian girl named Ántonia. The two became friends at a young age and their lives remained intertwined for decades. Jim teaches Ántonia how to read and write in English and her lust for life inspires him in turn. The story provides such an interesting look at immigrant life in Nebraska. There’s an underlying prejudice against the immigrants and they struggle to fit in. We know very little about Antonia’s father before he dies, but we later learn he loved to read and discuss ideas, but he struggled with the new language and felt completely out of place in America. The language barrier also increases their suspicions of those around them, because they’re constantly worried they are going to be deceived. Though their fears are sometimes justified, it doesn’t go far to make them new friends. I enjoyed the writing in this one, but the story didn’t resonate for me in the same way that Cather’s O Pioneers did. I went into that one knowing almost nothing and loved it so much. I think my expectations were a bit too high for this one. Jim isn’t a very charismatic character and when the plot meanders, we rely heavily on great characters. Luckily the writing is still wonderful, but I was left wanting a bit more.I’m still definitely a fan of her work though and I’m looking forward to trying Death Comes for the Archbishop next, but my expectations might be a bit more tempered. “I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two.”“I liked to watch a play with Lena; everything was wonderful to her, and everything was true. It was like going to revival meetings with someone who was always being converted. She handed her feelings over to the actors with a kind of fatalistic resignation. Accessories of costume and scene meant much more to her than to me.” 
    • 5/5
      This was simply a beautiful book to read. Willa Cather's tale of a young daughter of Bohemian immigrants on the Nebraska frontier is a delight from beginning to end. Antonia Shimerda's life is narrated by her friend Jim Burden. The story of her growth, travails and eventual success in becoming one with the land is one of the great frontier stories of America. Willa Cather captures the spirit of the land with wonderful descriptions of the landscape and life on the frontier; and its people by capturing of the emotions of the characters. It is similar in this aspect to Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth which I first read about the same time. Cather traversed this county in several of her books including this novel which is her masterpiece.
    • 1/5
      Apparently I should never live on the prairie, because it is so mind numbingly boring I think I'd sprout cobwebs in my brain.
    • 4/5
      Jim Burden and his grandparents move to Black Hawk (ie Middle of Nowhere) Nebraska at the same time as a family of Bohemian immigrants. Jim tells the story, but while it is autobiographical, it is as much Antonia's story as his own. Antonia is the middle child of the Bohemians. We watch them age to adulthood. There is no single plot thread, but rather each segment of the book has its own story with the same set of characters.
    • 4/5
      I'm still reading this, but so far, it's beautiful. Cather's descriptive passages are dizzying and textured--I feel as if I were there. I was a little put off at first by the way the stories were constructed (they seem to cut off without ending satisfactorily), but that aspect of the book has become charming.
    • 2/5
      I was expecting more from this one. Considering it's a "classic" and all...*Sigh* Oh well.It's a little about some so-so characters and a lot about life on the Nebraska plains in the early 20th century. The writing was descriptive and captivating at times but the story just didn't get me. Maybe that's why I put it down 2 times and read other books in between. And this is not a long book, people.So, I think the thing I liked most about the book was the title and the author's name. If I had another baby I might name her Willa (but I don't think I will...). So all the pleasure to be had from this book can come from a glance at the cover. :(
    • 5/5
      It would be hard to overstate the pleasure of this book. The fact that it is a straightforward tale told in an uncomplicated fashion should not mislead anyone into thinking it lacks depth. It is among other things a portrait of a generation and a love letter to the newly immigrant country girls, their vitality and beauty, the way they replenished the land. It is a tale told generously and yet with great intimacy because Cather uses storytelling to frame it. As someone just casually wandered in with a tale to tell. The moments were nature is celebrated are among the best I've read, again simple but still extraordinary. This book may send you back to an earlier period in literature yet I found it thrilling for its directness and self knowledge. Cather is bringing us a lost Eden and claims the territory like few others.
    • 5/5
      This book was interesting. The way the characters act, and the way they aren't what you would expect made it that more interesting to read. Taking place in a small Nebraska town, it teaches us that no matter where you come from or the kind of life you live you can be tolerante and accepting. It was very exciting to read, but I felt that every now and then, it was predictable. But about half way through the story, things stray away from predictable, and become anything but. It was much better to read the second half for me. I would recomend this book to you, but don't put it down because of the first half. Read on and find an amazing novel that is well thought and beautiful.
    • 4/5
      Rereading this book was a sheer pleasure. I reread my review from earlier in the year, but rereading gives more perspective, more detail, and more respect.Don’t look to it for plot; it’s more a tone poem or prose rhapsody.Cather takes us to the almost virgin prairies of Nebraska, seen first through the eyes of a 10 year old boy named Jim and a 14 year old immigrant girl named Antonia. Jim narrates their mutual discovery of the land, with its hardships and joys, and later the town, with its social customs and pleasures. Throughout this phase, Cather builds vivid characters in clear, seemingly effortless prose, so that you know them immediately and think of them as true individuals.But the story is more than that. Parallelling the maturation of the main characters is the growth of the farms, towns and country in the early part of the 20th century. Jim comes from Virginia, gets to Nebraska, eventually gets back to the east coast for school and career. Because he travels as an adult, we learn that some of the young women in the story end up in San Francisco, Seattle, even in the Alaska gold rush. We are always anchored in Nebraska, but we get the sense of the sweep west of the country from the people we have met in Nebraska and meet again.Not everyone is good, and bad things do happen, but this is ultimately a story of survival and joy. Highly recommended
    • 5/5
      There are parts in this book that just make your heart swell up -- I got lost in the vivid descriptions of the land, became caught up in the narrator's passionate account of the title character, and grew a little sad that the world in this book no longer exists.
    • 4/5
      'My Antonia' is a frank look into the lives of the people surrounding the main character, Jim. His narrative begins with stories about how he met each of them, continues into stories about their acquaintance and ends with stories about how these people turned out. It is an easy read, but quite enjoyable without the bawdy action/drama of today's historic novels. That's not to say the book does not tell of any scandals...there are plenty of those as well. But the scandals themselves are pushed to the back as the author tells how the characters dealt with and overcame them. A lovely novel that has stood the test of one century and carries on into the next.
    • 4/5
      Beautiful!
    • 5/5
      Having never read any of Willa Cather’s books in my teenage years – Cather was not required reading in the Canadian school system during my days – it is only recently that I have come to experience, and appreciate, her wonderful stories and the sparse, clear quality of her writing. I have a love for stories that depict the harsh realities of 19th century (and early 20th century) prairie life. While told from the point of view of Jim, the story is very much a pastoral expression about forging friendships and strong women. While some novels of this nature tend to merely communicate a place and time – like a picture - Cather’s story is a sentimental story, a wistful longing to revisit fond memories. How can one have fond memories of a harsh prairie winter, of the wretched scrabble for survival for newly immigrated families and confining feeling of certain social strictures? For Cather, even those harsh realities cannot hold back the beauty that can reside in an individual filled with kindness, optimism, strength, determination, and the full potential of life. Some may feel that Cather has not adequately focused on those harsh realities, but to expect that would be to miss what I believe to be the point of Cather’s story: to give readers a story of courage and endurance set against the expansive prairie sky.
    • 3/5
      I was forced to read this book for class, and trust me "forced" is the right word. There is no way I would have read this book had I not been held responsible for knowing what it was about. The writing is inarguably beautiful at times, but there was no distinct plot, very limited characterization, and overall, I think the story could have been told in a better way. I do not have any plans to reread this anytime soon.
    • 4/5
      I found it interesting to read of what life was like in Nebraska during the Nineteenth Century. It was harder than I could imagine and seeing it through the eyes of of a 10 year old boy as he grows up was very creative. I found myself underlining and saving quotes from the book as Ms Cather has a unique way of saying things. Her descriptions are marvelous. For instance here is a description of the prairie:"I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction…..this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it."And another toward the end of the book as he reminisces about their childhood:"As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass."This is a story that I will not soon forget and I will enjoy going back and reading the quotes I have saved from it.
    • 5/5
      Jim Burden, now a successful lawyer in New York, reflects back on his childhood growing up in Nebraska where he befriends Antonia, a recent immigrant girl from Bohemia. Although they come from different circumstances, their shared life on the farm as kids forms a bond that lasts a lifetime.
    • 3/5
      Bored.Bored.Bored.None of the characters were really compelling to me. None stood out. None were memorable. Nothing of any interest or note happened to grab my attention (aside from a very brief episode unrelated to the main characters near the end - at the risk of spoiling anything there was a few paragraphs on a murder suicide that was far more interesting than anything in the rest of the book).
    • 4/5
      My Antonia, Willa Cather, Reading a classic is a more civil, more genteel experience. Gone is the fear that on any page there will be unnecessary violent bloodshed, objectionable language, distasteful sexual innuendos, repulsive descriptions and convoluted plots, to name just a few. Also gone is the unexpected startling conclusion. Events progress in a very orderly fashion and while we might not anticipate the ending, we don’t expect astonishing finales. The story is told beautifully, in a direct manner, without the use of extraneous devices or artifice to inspire the reader, instead the emphasis is on the beauty and expression of the language used. Short by today’s standards, this book is less than 300 pages. It is written for a wide age range and is often a book assigned in school for those even as young as fifth or sixth grade. Because it is not written in the often hedonistic style of many of today’s novels, it is appropriate for young and old. The one drawback of the novel for me was that it seemed almost too simplistic, too passé, perhaps not interesting enough for today’s adult reader and might be more appropriate for younger readers, who are still a little naïve, so they can learn about and understand the evolution of our country and its people. Although the story being told is realistic, the reality today is so much more complicated, that the book may seem a bit out of touch without the benefit of analysis and discussion. In some ways we have indeed moved on, but overall, we sometimes seem to be standing in the same place, perhaps a little more sophisticated but by no means, less imperfect. At the tender age of 10, Jim Burden is orphaned and sent from his home in Virginia, to Nebraska, to live with his grandparents. There he meets Antonia, from Bohemia. Although she speaks no English and is four years his elder, a deep abiding friendship soon develops between them. The story is told by Jim Burdon, in the form of his memoir, but it basically is the story of Antonia through his eyes.Antonia is the embodiment of the strong, capable member of the pioneer family. The love of the land and its conquest motivates them. Although their lives are hard, they embrace it, bearing children, suffering hardships of climate, mortgages, ruined crops and failure and even, unfaithful spouses. Cather gives most of her immigrant female characters independent personalities at a time when the difference in class and station was highly evident and emphasized. The upper class women sat at home, perhaps doing their needlepoint. Exertion was considered unseemly. Yet, the farm girls worked the land or worked for families in town doing chores and performing menial labor. In reality they had more freedom of expression and freedom of choice to find their futures. For the sophisticated, refined woman, life consisted mainly of the hearth and home and proper decorum.The novel is easy to read. There are no extra words or confusing extraneous tangents. The reader will find the rather uncomplicated characters endearing with their homespun, earthy, personalities coupled with the real and touching experiences they endure at the turn of the 20th century. Although life was simpler than, immigrants and early pioneers suffered from the most of the same problems society faces today. The relationship of married partners, family members and friends is explored. Loyalty, ambition and greed, class distinction and prejudice, inequality for women, and even enduring hope and fulfillment of one’s dreams, are themes which are also visited in this book. This is a story of life, of survival, of accommodation to hardship. It is not exciting like the modern books of today, but it is beautiful literature about real people and their choices, how they lived and how they died, what they held important and what they held dear.
    • 3/5
      When I was a junior or senior in High School, this was assigned reading, and I purposefully chose not to read it. Now, mind you, I was an A student and to me, this was the equivalent of say, joining Al Qaeda. I did it because I had this tremendous burst of rebelliousness, it was spring, and I actually had a girlfriend. Miss Burrell the English Teacher, caught my crime, by means of a couple test questions and class questions and I was red-faced for it. Well, for you, Miss Burrel I have read this American classic, some 40 years later. And to avoid the dreaded LT blue flag, here's my review: Cather's masterpiece was boring as snot..
    • 4/5
      This is a lovely book. Willa Cather tells her story about growing up in the kind of episodic way that most childhoods are remembered in. And, really, My Antonia is about memory, maybe more so than anything else. Cather explores the memories of Jim Burden and his friend Antonia growing up on the Nebraska prarie, but she's also evoking fond memories of the wild American frontier that was vanishing when she wrote the novel. It's a quite emotional read, not in that you'll be crying by the end, but in that Cather manages to depict the emotions her characters experience in their rather ordinary lives in such a realistic way that you can't help but identify. I really enjoyed this book and will definitely be picking up more of Cather's work in the future.

    Book preview

    Willa Cather My Antonia - Willa Cather

    CONTENTS

    INTRODUCTION : WILLA CATHER : A WOMAN AHEAD OF HER TIME

    Biography

    EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

    CAREER

    PERSONAL LIFE

    WRITING INFLUENCES

    LITERARY STYLE AND THEMES

    LATER YEARS

    LEGACY AND HONOR

    BIBLIOGRAPHY

    Nonfiction

    Novel

    Collections

    REFERENCES

    MY ÁNTONIA - ORIGINAL 1918 EDITION

    Book One

    Book Two

    Book Three

    Book Four

    Book Five

    STUDY GUIDE

    INTRODUCTION

    CHARACTERS

    NARRATION

    PLOT SUMMARY

    RECEPTION AND LITERARY SIGNIFICANCE

    PUBLICATION HISTORY

    ALLUSIONS TO THE NOVEL

    ADAPTATIONS

    REFERENCE

    SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

    Books

    Articles

    Introduction :

    Willa Cather : A woman

    ahead of her time

    Biography

    Willa Sibert Cather ( December 7, 1873[²] – April 24, 1947[³]) was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I.

    Cather grew up in Virginia and Nebraska, and graduated from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years,[⁴] supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33 she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence in Grand Manan, New Brunswick.

    Early life and education

    Cather was born Wilella Sibert Cather in 1873 on her maternal grandmother's farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia. Her father was Charles Fectigue Cather (d. 1928), whose family had lived on land in the valley for six generations. Cather's family originated in Wales, the family name deriving from Cadair Idris, a mountain in Gwynedd.[²] Her mother was Mary Virginia Boak (died 1931), a former school teacher. Within a year of Cather's birth, the family moved to Willow Shade, a Greek Revival-style home on 130 acres given to them by her paternal grandparents.

    At the urging of Charles Cathers' parents, the family moved to Nebraska in 1883 when Willa was nine years old. The rich, flat farmland appealed to Charles' father, and the family wished to escape the tuberculosis outbreaks that were rampant in Virginia.[⁵] Willa's father tried his hand at farming for eighteen months; then he moved the family into the town of Red Cloud, where he opened a real estate and insurance business, and the children attended school for the first time.[²] Some of the earliest work produced by Cather was first published in the Red Cloud Chief, the city's local paper.[⁶] Cather's time in the western state, still on the frontier, was a deeply formative experience for her. She was intensely moved by the dramatic environment and weather, the vastness of the Nebraska prairie, and the various cultures of the European-American, immigrant and Native American families in the area.[³] Like Jim Burden in My Antonia the young Willa Cather saw the Nebraska frontier as a place where there was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the materials out of which countries were made...Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out.[⁷]

    Mary Cather had six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass, Jessica, James, John, and Elsie.[⁸]:5–7 Cather was closer to her brothers than to her sisters whom, according to biographer Hermione Lee, she seems not to have liked very much.[⁹] Cather read widely, having made friends with a Jewish couple, the Weiners, who offered her free access to their extensive library.[¹⁰] She made house calls with the local physician, Dr. Robert Damerell, and decided to become a doctor.[¹¹]

    After Cather's essay on Thomas Carlyle was published in the Nebraska State Journal during her freshman year at the University of Nebraska,[²] she became a regular contributor to the Journal. In addition to her work with the local paper, Cather also served as the managing editor of The Hesperian, the University of Nebraska's student newspaper, and associated at the Lincoln Courier.[¹²] She changed her plans to major in science and become a physician, instead graduating with a B.A. in English in 1894.

    Career

    In 1896, Cather moved to Pittsburgh after being hired to write for the Home Monthly,[¹³] a women's magazine patterned after the successful Ladies' Home Journal.[²] A year later, she became a telegraph editor and drama critic for the Pittsburgh Leader and frequently contributed poetry and short fiction to The Library, another local publication.[¹⁴] In Pittsburgh, she taught Latin, algebra, and English composition[²] at Central High School for one year; she then taught English and Latin at Allegheny High School, where she became the head of the English department.

    During her first year in Pittsburgh, Cather also wrote a number of short stories, including "Tommy, the Unsentimental, about a Nebraskan girl with a boy's name, who looks like a boy and saves her father's bank business. Janis P. Stout calls this story one of several Cather works that demonstrate the speciousness of rigid gender roles and give favorable treatment to characters who undermine conventions."[¹⁵]

    Cather's first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden, was published in 1905 by McClure, Phillips, and Company. It contains several of Cather's best-known stories—"A Wagner Matinee," "The Sculptor's Funeral," and "Paul's Case."

    In 1906 Cather moved to New York City after being offered a position on the editorial staff of McClure's Magazine, a periodical connected with the publisher of The Troll Garden the year before. During her first year at McClure's she wrote a critical biography of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, although Georgine Milmine, a freelance researcher, was named as the sole author. Milmine had performed copious amounts of research, but she did not have the resources to produce a manuscript on her own.[²]Mary Baker G. Eddy: The Story of Her Life and the History of Christian Science was published in McClure's in fourteen installments over the next eighteen months, and then in book form as The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1909).

    McClure's serialized Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912). Most reviews were favorable. The New York Times praised the dramatic situations and the clever conversations,[²] and The Atlantic called the writing deft and skillful.[¹⁷]

    Cather followed Alexander's Bridge with her Prairie Trilogy: O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). These works became both popular and critical successes. Cather was celebrated by national critics such as H. L. Mencken for writing in plainspoken language about ordinary people. Sinclair Lewis praised her work for making the outside world know Nebraska as no one else has done.[¹⁸]

    Through the 1910s and 1920s, Cather was firmly established as a major American writer, receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1922 for her novel One of Ours. By the 1930s, however, critics began to dismiss her as a romantic, nostalgic writer who could not cope with the present.[¹⁹] Critics such as Granville Hicks charged Cather with failing to confront contemporary life as it is[²⁰] and escaping into an idealized past. During the hardships of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, her work was seen as lacking social relevance.[²⁰]

    Cather's conservative politics and the same subject matter that appealed to Mencken, Randolph Bourne, and Carl Van Doren soured her reputation with younger, often left-leaning critics such as Hicks and Edmund Wilson.[²¹] Discouraged by the negative criticism of her work, Cather became defensive. She destroyed some of her correspondence and included a provision in her will that forbade the publication of her letters.[²²]

    Despite this critical opposition to her work, Cather remained a popular writer whose novels and short story collections continued to sell well. In 1931 Shadows on the Rock was the most widely read novel in the US, and Lucy Gayheart became a bestseller in 1935.[²³]

    Personal life

    As a student at the University of Nebraska in the early 1890s, Cather sometimes used the masculine nickname William and wore masculine clothing.[²⁴] A photograph in the University of Nebraska archives depicts Cather dressed like a young man and with her hair shingled, at a time when females wore their hair fashionably long.[⁸]

    Isabelle McClung, an unidentified man, and Willa Cather aboard the SS Westernland, 1902. Throughout Cather's adult life, her most significant friendships were with women. These included her college friend Louise Pound; the Pittsburgh socialite Isabelle McClung, with whom Cather traveled to Europe and at whose Toronto home she stayed for prolonged visits;[²⁵] the opera singer Olive Fremstad; the pianist Yaltah Menuhin;[²⁶] and most notably, the editor Edith Lewis, with whom Cather lived the last 39 years of her life. Cather's sexual identity remains a point of contention among scholars. While many argue for Cather as a lesbian and interpret her work through a lens of queer theory,[²⁷] a highly vocal contingent of Cather scholars adamantly oppose such considerations. For example, scholar Janet Sharistanian has written, Cather did not label herself a lesbian nor would she wish us to do so, and we do not know whether her relationships with women were sexual. In any case, it is anachronistic to assume that if Cather's historical context had been different, she would have chosen to write overtly about homoerotic love.[²⁸]

    Cather's relationship with Edith Lewis began in the early 1900s. The two women lived together in a series of apartments in New York City from 1908 until the writer's death in 1947. From 1913 to 1927, Cather and Lewis lived at No. 5 Bank Street in Greenwich Village. They moved when the apartment was scheduled for demolition during the construction of the Broadway – Seventh Avenue New York City Subway line (now the 1 2 3 trains).[²⁹] Cather selected Lewis as the literary trustee for her estate.[³⁰] Although she was born into a Baptist family, Cather began attending Episcopal services in 1906, and she joined the Episcopal Church in 1922.[³¹]

    Beginning in 1922, Cather spent summers on Grand Manan Island, in New Brunswick, where she bought a cottage in Whale Cove, on the Bay of Fundy and where her penultimate short story, Before Breakfast, is set.[³²] It was the only house she ever owned.[²]:23 She valued the seclusion of the island, and did not mind that her cottage had neither indoor plumbing nor electricity. Anyone wishing to reach her could do so by telegraph or mail.[²] She stopped going to Grand Manan Island when Canada entered World War II (1939), since travel was more difficult, tourist amenities were scarcer, and a favourite island doctor had died. Cather was experiencing a long recuperation from gall bladder surgery.[²]

    A resolutely private person, Cather had destroyed many old drafts, personal papers, and letters. Her will restricted the ability of scholars to quote from the personal papers that remain. However, in April 2013, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather—a collection of 566 letters Cather wrote to friends, family, and literary acquaintances such as Thornton Wilder and F. Scott Fitzgerald—was published, two years following the death of Cather's nephew and second literary executor, Charles Cather. Willa Cather's correspondence revealed complexity of her character and inner world.[³³] The letters do not disclose any intimate details about Cather's personal life, but they do make clear that [her] primary emotional attachments were to women.[³⁴]

    Writing influences

    Cather admired Henry James as a mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives.[³⁵] She generally preferred past literary masters to contemporary writers. Some particular favorites were :

    Dickens, Thackeray, Emerson, Hawthorne, Balzac, Flaubert, and Tolstoy.

    While Cather enjoyed the novels of George Eliot, the Brontës, and Jane Austen, she regarded most women writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental and mawkish.[²] Cather's biographer James Woodress notes that Cather so completely... embraced masculine values that when she wrote about women writers, she sounded like a patronizing man.[²] One contemporary exception was Sarah Orne Jewett, who became Cather's friend and mentor. Jewett advised Cather to use female narrators in her fiction, but Cather preferred to write from a male point of view.[²]:214 Jewett also encouraged Cather to write about subjects that had teased the mind for years.[³⁶] Chief among these subjects were the people and experiences Cather remembered from her years in Nebraska. She dedicated O Pioneers!, the first novel in her Prairie Trilogy, to Jewett. Cather also admired the work of Katherine Mansfield, praising Mansfield's ability to throw a luminous streak out onto the shadowy realm of personal relationships.[³⁷]

    Cather's high regard for the immigrant families forging lives and enduring hardships on the Nebraska plains shaped a good deal of her fiction. As a child, she visited immigrant families in her area and raced home in the most unreasonable state of excitement, feeling that she had got inside another person's skin.[³⁸] Following a trip to Red Cloud in 1916 to visit her family, Cather decided to write a novel based on the events in the life of her childhood friend Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a Bohemian girl who became the model for the title character in My Ántonia.[²] Cather was likewise fascinated by the French-Canadian pioneers from Quebec who had settled in the Red Cloud area while she was a girl.[³⁹]

    During a brief stopover in Quebec with Edith Lewis in 1927, Cather was inspired to write a novel set in that French-Canadian city. Lewis recalled: From the first moment that she looked down from the windows of the [Chateau] Frontenac [Hotel] on the pointed roofs and Norman outlines of the town of Quebec, Willa Cather was not merely stirred and charmed—she was overwhelmed by the flood of memories, recognition, surmise it called up; by the sense of its extraordinary French character, isolated and kept intact through hundreds of years, as if by a miracle, on this great un-French continent.[²] Cather finished her novel Shadows on the Rock, an historical novel set in 17th-century Quebec, in 1931; it was later included in Life Magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944.[⁴⁰] The French influence is found in many other Cather works, including Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and her final, unfinished novel set in Avignon.

    Literary style and themes

    Although Cather began her writing career as a journalist, she made a distinction between journalism, which she saw as being primarily informative, and literature, which she saw as an art form.[⁴¹] Cather's work is often marked by its nostalgic tone, her subject matter and themes drawn from memories of her early years on the American plains. Some critics have charged Cather with being out of touch with her times and failing to use more experimental techniques, such as stream of consciousness, in her writing.[⁴²] However, others have pointed out that Cather could follow no other literary path but her own:

    She had formed and matured her ideas on art before she wrote a novel. She had no more reason to follow Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, whose work she respected, than they did to follow her. Her style solves the problems in which she was interested. She wanted to stand midway between the journalists whose omniscient objectivity accumulate more fact than any character could notice and the psychological novelist whose use of subjective point of view stories distorts objective reality. She developed her theory on a middle ground, selecting facts from experience on the basis of feeling and then presenting the experience in a lucid, objective style. Cather's style is not the accumulative cataloguing of the journalists, nor the fragmentary atomism of psychological associations.[⁴³]

    In a 1920 essay on Willa Cather, H.L. Mencken apologized for having suggested that Cather was a talented but inconsequential imitator of Edith Wharton. He praised her for abandoning New England as a locale for the Middle West of the great immigrations. Mencken describes My Antonia as a sudden leap forward by Cather. Here was a novel planned with the utmost skill, and executed in truly admirable fashion. he wrote. Here, unless I err gravely, was the best piece of fiction ever done by a woman in America.[⁴⁴][⁴⁵]

    The English novelist A. S. Byatt observes that with each work Cather reinvented the novel form to look at a new human world.[⁴⁶] Byatt identifies some of Cather's major themes as the rising and setting of the sun, the brevity of life, the relation between dailiness and the rupture of dailiness, the moment when 'desire shall fail'.[⁴⁶] Particularly in her frontier novels, Cather wrote of life's terrors ... and its beauties.[⁴⁷] Like the exiled characters of Henry James, an author who had a great influence on Cather, most of Cather's major characters live as exiled immigrants, people trying to make their way in circumstances strange to them.[⁴⁸] Joseph Urgo in Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration says Cather felt a connection between the immigrants' sense of homelessness and exile and her own feelings of exile when she lived on the frontier.[⁴⁹] Susan Rosowski wrote that Cather was the first to give immigrants heroic stature in serious American literature.[⁵⁰]

    Later years

    Cather made her last trip to Red Cloud in 1931 for a family gathering following the death of her mother. She continued to stay in touch with her Red Cloud friends and she sent money to Annie Pavelka and other country families during the Depression years.[⁹]

    In 1932, Cather published Obscure Destinies, her final collection of short fiction, which contained one of her most highly regarded stories, Neighbour Rosicky. Cather and Edith Lewis moved into a new apartment on Park Avenue, and Cather began work on her next novel, Lucy Gayheart, a book that revealed its author's darkening vision as she began her seventh decade.[²]

    Cather suffered two devastating losses in 1938. In June, her favorite brother, Douglass, died of a heart attack. Cather was too grief-stricken to attend the funeral. Several months later, Isabelle McClung died. Cather and McClung had lived together when Cather first arrived in Pittsburgh, and while McClung eventually married and moved with her husband to Toronto,[⁵¹] the two women remained devoted friends. Cather wrote friends that Isabelle was the one for whom all her books had been written.[²]

    Cather grew increasingly discouraged as the United States moved closer to involvement in World War II. When the French army surrendered to Nazi Germany, Cather wrote in her diary: There seems to be no future at all for people of my generation.[⁸] During the summer of 1940, Cather and Lewis went to Grand Manan for the last time, and Cather finished what was to be her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a novel much darker in tone and subject matter than her previous works.[²] Sapphira lacks a moral sense and is not a character who evokes empathy. However, the novel was a great critical and commercial success, with an advance printing of 25,000 copies. It was then adopted by the Book of the Month Club, which bought more than 200,000 copies.[²]

    Although an inflamed tendon in her hand hampered her writing, Cather managed to finish a good part of a novel set in Avignon, France. However, Edith Lewis destroyed the manuscript, according to Cather's instructions, when Cather died. Cather's remaining papers reveal that Cather had titled the unfinished manuscript Hard Punishments and set it in the 14th century during the papal reign of Antipope Benedict XIV.[⁹] She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943.[⁵²] In 1944, Cather received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, an award given once a decade for an author's total accomplishments.[²] Though Cather suffered from no specific medical problems in her last years, those closest to her felt that her health was deteriorating.[²]

    On April 24, 1947, Cather died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 73 in her home at 570 Park Avenue in Manhattan.[²][⁵³]

    Cather was buried in the Old Burying Ground, behind the Jaffrey Center Meeting House in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.[⁵⁴] Her grave site, which she shares with Edith Lewis, is at the southwest corner of the graveyard. She had first visited Jaffrey in 1917 with Isabelle McClung, staying at the Shattuck Inn, where she came late in life for the seclusion necessary for her writing.[⁵⁵] The inscription on her tombstone reads:

    Legacy and honor

    An American Arts Commemorative Series medallion depicting Cather

    1955, The Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation (now the Willa Cather Foundation) was founded to support the study of her life and work, and to maintain many sites in her hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska.

    1962, Cather was elected to the Nebraska Hall of Fame.[⁵⁶]

    1973, the U.S. Postal Service honored Willa Cather by issuing a stamp bearing her image.

    1981, the U.S. Mint created the Willa Cather half-ounce gold medallion.[⁵⁷]

    1986, Cather was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame.

    2000, Cather was named a member of the inaugural class of Virginia Women in History.[⁵⁸]

    2006, Willa Cather Foundation received a National Endowment of the Humanities grant to develop its work, which includes maintaining a slice of Nebraskan prairie as Catherland, curating the Cather childhood home, holding Cather conferences, and publishing a Cather newsletter. [⁵⁹]

    2011, Cather was inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame.

    Bibliography

    Nonfiction

    Willa Cather and Georgine Milmine, The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1909, reprinted U of Nebraska Press, 1993)

    Not Under Forty (1936, essays)

    On Writing (1949, reprint U Nebraska Press, 1988.

    Novel

    Alexander's Bridge (1912)

    O Pioneers! (1913)

    The Song of the Lark (1915)

    My Ántonia (1918)

    One of Ours (1922)

    A Lost Lady (1923)

    The Professor's House (1925)

    My Mortal Enemy (1926)

    Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)

    Shadows on the Rock (1931)

    Lucy Gayheart (1935)

    Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940)

    Essays and Article

    On the Art of Fiction (1920), The Borzoi

    Collections

    April Twilights (1903, poetry)

    The Troll Garden (1905, short stories)

    Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920, short stories)

    Obscure Destinies (1932, three stories)

    Not Under Forty (1936, essays)

    The Old Beauty and Others (1948, three stories)

    Willa Cather: On Writing (1949, essays)

    Five Stories (1956, published by the Estate of Willa Cather)

    The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (published 2013)

    This does not include recent collections of early stories which were originally published in periodicals.[⁶⁰][⁶¹]

    References

    1. Willa Cather in The American Heritage Dictionary.

    2. Woodress, James (1987). Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. p. 516. Cather's birth date is confirmed by a birth certificate and a January 22, 1874, letter of her father's referring to her. While working at McClure's Magazine, Cather claimed to be born in 1875. After 1920, she claimed 1876 as her birth year. That is the date carved into her gravestone at Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

    3. Willa Cather's Biography. Willa Cather Foundation website. Retrieved March 11, 2015.

    4. Milfred R. Bennet. Willa Cather in Pittsburgh. Prairie Schooner, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 1959), pp. 64–76. Retrieved December 07, 2013.

    5. Lee, Hermoine. Willa Cather: Double Lives.NY:Pantheon, 1989, p. 30

    6. Walter, Katherine. About The Red Cloud Chief. Nebraska Newspapers. University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

    7. Cather, Willa. My Antonia. NY:Mariner Books, 1995, p. 8

    8. Lewis, Edith (2000). Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

    9. Lee, Hermione (1990). Willa Cather: Double Lives. New York: Pantheon Books.

    10. Acocella, Joan. Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, p. 7

    11. Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987, p. 52

    12. Walter, Katherine. Early Nebraska Journalist. University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Retrieved October 27, 2016.

    13. Lowry, Patricia (December 8, 2008). Places: In search of Willa Cather's East End haunts. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Retrieved July 20, 2010.

    14. And Death Comes for Willa Cather, Famous Author, Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, 25 April 1947

    15. Stout, Janis P. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000, p. 90.

    16. Crane, My Antonia p. 57.

    17. The Atlantic. November 1912, p. 683.

    18. Omaha World-Herald, April 9, 1921.

    19. O'Brien, Sharon. Being Noncanonical: The Case Against Willa Cather. Cathy N. Davidson (ed.), Reading in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

    20. O'Brien, p. 246.

    21. Decker, James M. (April 2003). Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. Modern Language Review.

    22. Joan Acocella. What’s in Cather’s Letters. The New Yorker, April 9, 2013.

    23. Acocella, Joan. Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. Lincoln, NE.:University of Nebraska Press, 2000, p. 25.

    24. O'Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford, 1987. pp. 96–113.

    25. Gatenby, Greg (1993). The Wild is Always There: Canada through the eyes of foreign writers. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada. p. 214. ISBN0-394-28023-7.

    26. Rolfe, Lionel. (2004). The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin & Willa Cather. American Legends/ California Classics Books, 168 pp. ISBN 1-879395-46-0.

    27. Lindemann, Marilee. Willa Cather: Queering America. NY:Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 25.

    28. Sharistanian, Janet. Introduction to My Ántonia, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. xiii.

    29. Bunyan, Patrick. All Around the Town: Amazing Manhattan Facts and Curiosities, p. 66. New York: Fordham University Press, 1999

    30. Cather's Life: Chronology. The Willa Cather Archive, University of Nebraska. Retrieved March 21, 2007.

    31. Acocella, Joan. Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, p.4.

    32. Ahern, Amy. Willa Cather: Longer Biographical Sketch. The Willa Cather Archive, University of Nebraska. Retrieved March 21, 2007.

    33. Christopher Benfey. Willa Cather's Correspondence Reveals Something New: The rage of a great American novelist, The New Republic, October 12, 2013.

    34. Schuessler, Jennifer. O Revelations! Letters, Once Banned, Flesh Out Willa Cather. The New York Times. March 22, 2013, A1.

    35. Curtin, William M., ed. The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893–1902. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1970, p. 248.

    36. Cather, Willa. Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1988, p. 48

    37. Cather, Willa. Not Under Forty. New York: Knopf, 1936, p. 135.

    38. Bennet, Mildred. The World of Willa Cather. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961, pp. 169–70.

    39. Danker, Kathleen (Winter 2000). "The Influence of Willa Cather's French-Canadian Neighbors in Nebraska in Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock." Great Plains Quarterly. p. 34.

    40. Canby, Henry Seidel. The 100 Outstanding Books of 1924–1944. Life Magazine, August 14, 1944. Chosen in collaboration with the magazine's editors.

    41. Middleton, Joanne (1990).

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1