Sarah Orne Jewett, a successful author from Maine whom Cather had met during her McClure’s years, inspired her to devote herself full-time to creating literature and to write about her childhood, which she did in several novels of the prairies; one of the best known is O Pioneers! (1913), whose title comes from a poem by Walt Whitman. A critic of the rise of materialism, Cather addressed the social impact of the developing industrial age in A Lost Lady (1923), which was made into a film starring Barbara Stanwyck. For One of Ours (1922), a novel about World War I, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.

In her later years Cather produced some of her most recognized work. For Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) she won a gold medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1933 she received the Prix Femina Americaine for Shadows on the Rock (1931), a collection of short stories. Two years after publishing her last novel, The Best Years (1945), Willa Cather died of a cerebral hemorrhage, on April 24, 1947, in New York City. A collection of short fiction, The Old Beauty and Others (1948), and a literary treatise, On Writing (1949), were published after her death. Among Cather’s other accomplishments were honorary doctorate degrees from Columbia, Princeton, and Yale Universities.

THE WORLD OF WILLA CATHER AND MY ÁNTONIA

1638 Dutch explorer Peter Minuit leads Swedish immigrants to establish the first Swedish colony in Delaware Bay.
1848 The California Gold Rush stimulates emigration from Scandinavia to the U.S. Midwest.
1855Walt Whitman publishes the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a collection of poems he will expand in several editions before his death in 1892; his poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers!,” which will have an impact on Willa Cather, will be published in his collection Drum Taps in 1865 and incorporated into the 1881-1882 edition of Leaves of Grass.
1862 The passage of the Homestead Act encourages immigrants to cultivate the U.S. prairies; immigrant settlement in the Midwest increases significantly.
1873 On December 7 Wilella Cather is born, the eldest of her parent’s seven children, in Winchester, Virginia, a farming village near the Blue Ridge Mountains.
1877 Sarah Orne Jewett, who will become one of Cather’s mentors , publishes Deephaven, her first collection of stories and sketches, about small-town life in New England.
1883 The Cathers join Wilella’s grandparents and her uncle George in Webster County, Nebraska.
1884 The Cathers settle in Red Cloud, Nebraska, a railroad town on the prairie, where Cather’s father opens a farm mortgage and insurance business. Most of their neighbors are European immigrants. Cather enrolls in Red Cloud High School and meets Annie Sadilek Pavelka, on whom she will base the title character in her novel My Ántonia.
1890 Cather graduates from high school and moves to Lincoln to study for the entrance exam for the University of Nebraska.
To finance her education, she works as a drama critic for the Nebraska State Journal.
1892 New York City becomes an immigration mecca as Ellis Island opens on February 14. Cather’s short story “Peter,” which will later be incorporated into My Ántonia, is published in a Boston magazine.
1895Cather graduates from the University of Nebraska and returns to her family in Red Cloud.
1896She moves to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she begins work as an editor at the Home Monthly, a family magazine, and as an editor and drama critic for the Pittsburgh Daily Leader, a newspaper.
1901 Cather teaches English and Latin at Central High School in Pittsburgh, then transfers to Allegheny High School, where she becomes head of the English Department.
1902 She visits Europe.
1903 Upon her return from Europe, Cather publishes a collection of verse, April Twilights.
1905 She publishes The Troll Garden, her first collection of short stories; it includes “Paul’s Case,” a story, set in Pittsburgh, of a young man with tragically frustrated aspirations.
1906 Cather moves to New York City to write for McClure’s Mag azine, where she eventually will become the managing editor . She moves in with Edith Lewis, a colleague at McClure’s.
1908 Cather meets Sarah Orne Jewett, a successful writer from Maine, who encourages her to pursue writing full-time and inspires her to write about her experiences in Nebraska.
1911 She begins to write “Alexandra,” which will become part of O Pioneers!, a semi-autobiographical novel about the early Scandinavian and Bohemian settlers of Nebraska.
1912 Cather’s first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, is published, and she works on “The White Mulberry Tree,” which will become another part of O Pioneers! She visits the Southwest for the first time.
1913 O Pioneers! is published, dedicated to Sarah Orne Jewett.
1915 Cather visits Mesa Verde in Colorado. The Song of the Lark, a psychological novel that explores the meaning of aesthetics
and music, is published. Cather returns to the Southwest and visits Wyoming and Nebraska; she meets her childhood friend Annie Pavelka again.
1917 While living in New Hampshire, Cather writes My Ántonia, based on Pavelka.
1918 My Ántonia is published to critical acclaim; H. L. Mencken calls it the greatest piece of fiction written by a woman in America.
1920 American women win the right to vote with passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Cather publishes Youth and the Bright Medusa, a collection of eight short stories; The Nation hails it as a representation of “the triumph of mind over Nebraska.”
1922 Cather publishes One of Ours, a novel about World War I.
1923 Cather wins the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours. She criticizes the developing industrial age in the novel A Lost Lady.
1925 Cather publishes The Professor’s House, a novel that juxtaposes a teacher’s middle-aged disillusionment and his memories of the work of a brilliant student.
1926 She publishes another novel, My Mortal Enemy, in which the heroine regrets the choices she has made.
1927 Cather publishes the historical novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, set in the American Southwest. The Hollywood film version of A Lost Lady, starring actress Irene Rich, premiers in Red Cloud; a second version, starring Barbara Stanwyck, will be released in 1934.
1930 Cather receives the gold medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Death Comes for the Archbishop.
1931 She publishes Shadows on the Rock, a collection of three short stories for which she is awarded the Prix Femina Americaine in 1933.
1932 She publishes more short stories in Obscure Destinies.
1935 She publishes Lucy Gayheart, a novel that turns on the tension between artistic values and those of hometown life.
1936 Cather publishes Not Under Forty, a collection of literary critiques.
1940 She publishes Sapphira and the Slave Girl.
1945 The Best Years, Cather’s last novel, is published.
1947On April 24 Willa Cather dies of a cerebral hemorrhage in her Madison Avenue apartment in New York City. She is buried in New Hampshire.
1948 The Old Beauty and Others, a collection of Cather’s shorter fiction, is published.
1949 Her literary treatise On Writing is published.
1974 Cather is inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners in Oklahoma City. The Nature Conservancy buys a 210-acre plot of grassland south of Red Cloud and dedicates it as the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie.
1988 Cather is inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca, New York.

INTRODUCTION

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IT WAS NOT UNTIL the age of forty-five and the publication of her fourth novel, My Ántonia (1918), that Willa Cather established herself as a kind of poet laureate of the American prairie. Although she had been publishing poems, short fiction, and essays since the early 1890s as a precocious undergraduate at the University of Nebraska, Cather endured a long apprenticeship of spadework, first in Pittsburgh and then in New York, as a teacher, editor, and journalist. In 1912, after six frenetic years as the managing editor at McClure’s Magazine, Cather resigned in order to launch her career as a novelist. Her first effort, Alexander’s Bridge, was a failure in Cather’s later estimation, but this Jamesian tale of adultery set in Boston and London provided the impetus for three important novels, written in quick succession, that draw heavily upon Cather’s childhood on the Nebraska prairie: O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia.

By the time My Ántonia appeared, the influential H. L. Mencken was already one of Cather’s champions, but he was not alone in his superlative reaction to what he considered not only Cather’s most successful novel yet, but “one of the best that any American has ever done” (“My Ántonia,” p. 8; see “For Further Reading”). When Cather died in 1947, her published works included twelve novels, three collections of stories, one book of verse, a volume of essays, and a great deal of uncollected prose, much of which engages subject-matter far removed in time and space from her Nebraska-inspired fiction. Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), for instance, is her much-admired historical novel based on the circumstances of a nineteenth-century Catholic mission in New Mexico, while Shadows on the Rock (1931), set in seventeenth-century Quebec, is even more remote from the midwestern plains.