The American novelist of My Ántonia and A Lost Lady, whose work Fitzgerald admired to the point of writing to apologise for an unintended echo.
Willa Cather was an American novelist who wrote about settlers and immigrant families on the Great Plains. She was born in Virginia on 7 December 1873 and moved with her family to Webster County, Nebraska, when she was nine. The prairie town of Red Cloud and the farming families around it supplied the material for O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915) and My Ántonia (1918).
Cather supported herself for a decade as a magazine editor, journalist and high-school teacher in Pittsburgh before joining McClure's Magazine in New York in 1906. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours, a novel set during the First World War. Death Comes for the Archbishop, published in 1927, sold 86,500 copies in two years.
She lived the last thirty-nine years of her life in New York with the editor Edith Lewis. Cather destroyed letters and drafts and asked her correspondents to do the same, and her 1943 will forbade the publication of her letters. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage at her Park Avenue apartment on 24 April 1947, aged 73, and is buried in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.
Willa Cather was born Wilella Sibert Cather on 7 December 1873, on her maternal grandmother's farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia. Her father, Charles Fectigue Cather, came from a family of Welsh descent. Her mother, Mary Virginia Boak, had been a schoolteacher. Before Willa was a year old the family moved to Willow Shade, a Greek Revival house on 130 acres given to them by her paternal grandparents. Six more children followed: Roscoe, Douglass, Jessica, James, John and Elsie. Willa was closer to her brothers than to her sisters. The biographer Hermione Lee writes that she seems not to have liked her sisters very much.
In 1883, when Willa was nine, the family moved to Webster County, Nebraska. Charles Cather's parents had urged the move, the farmland appealed to his father, and the family also wanted to get away from the tuberculosis outbreaks in Virginia. Willa's father farmed for eighteen months, then moved everyone into the town of Red Cloud and opened a real estate and insurance business. The children went to school there for the first time.
Red Cloud supplied Cather with material she used for the rest of her life. A Jewish couple in the town, the Wieners, gave her free run of their large private library, and she read her way through it. She rode along on house calls with the local physician and decided to become a surgeon. Some of her earliest writing appeared in the local paper, the Red Cloud Chief. For a short time she signed herself William, then went back to Willa. She graduated from Red Cloud High School in 1890, at sixteen, and moved to Lincoln to enter the University of Nebraska.
Cather was inconsistent about her own birth year. At the direction of the staff of McClure's Magazine she gave it as 1875, and after 1920 she gave it as 1876. The later date is the one carved on her gravestone in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. A birth certificate, an 1874 letter of her father's and her university records all give 1873.
In her first year at the University of Nebraska an essay she had written on Thomas Carlyle appeared in the Nebraska State Journal without her knowledge. She began writing columns for the paper at a dollar each, and said that seeing her words on the printed page had “a kind of hypnotic effect” on her. She edited The Hesperian, the university's student newspaper, and contributed to the Lincoln Courier. She had planned to study science and become a physician, but changed course and took a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1895.
Cather took a writing job with Home Monthly, a women's magazine, and moved to Pittsburgh in 1896. When the magazine was sold a year later she became a telegraph editor and critic for the Pittsburgh Leader, and contributed poems and stories to a local publication called The Library. She also taught. She gave a year of Latin, algebra and English composition at Central High School, then taught English and Latin at Allegheny High School, where she rose to head the English department.
She left the Pittsburgh Leader in the spring of 1900 and moved to Washington that autumn. In the summer of 1902 she travelled to Europe with Isabelle McClung, the Pittsburgh friend she had lived with since arriving in the city. Her first book was a collection of poems, April Twilights, published in 1903. She was clear about how much weight it carried. In 1925 she wrote that she did not take herself seriously as a poet. The Troll Garden, her first book of short stories, followed in 1905 and contained “Paul's Case”, “A Wagner Matinee” and “The Sculptor's Funeral”.
Cather took an editorial job at McClure's Magazine in 1906 and moved to New York, which remained her main home for the rest of her life. She spent most of 1907 in Boston, writing a serial about the Christian Science leader Mary Baker Eddy. The magazine credited the freelance journalist Georgine Milmine as sole author, and the series was published as a book under Milmine's name. A letter in the Christian Science church archives, brought to light by the Eddy biographer Gillian Gill, showed that Cather wrote articles two to fourteen of the fourteen-part series.
McClure's serialised her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, in 1912. Most reviews were favourable, and The Atlantic called the writing deft and skillful, but Cather herself soon judged the book weak and shallow. The three novels that followed were set on the Great Plains and made her reputation: O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915) and My Ántonia (1918). After a visit to Red Cloud in 1916 she decided to build a novel around her childhood friend Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a Bohemian girl who became the model for Ántonia.
In 1920 Cather left her publisher, Houghton Mifflin. It had spent only $300 advertising My Ántonia, refused to pay for the illustrations she had commissioned from Władysław T. Benda, and produced a cheap-looking volume. She moved to the young firm of Alfred A. Knopf, which advertised its authors and made books she liked the look of. Almost every Knopf book of hers in the 1920s matched the firm's design from its second printing onward.
The Pulitzer Prize for the novel went to One of Ours in 1923. A Lost Lady (1923) and The Professor's House (1925) raised her standing further. She was asked to give several hundred public lectures, earned large royalties, and sold the film rights to A Lost Lady. My Mortal Enemy (1926) attracted little notice. Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) sold 86,500 copies in two years and was later included on the Modern Library list of the hundred best novels of the twentieth century. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1929.
Cather met the editor Edith Lewis in the early 1900s, and from 1908 the two women shared a series of New York apartments until Cather's death in 1947. From 1913 to 1927 they lived at No. 5 Bank Street in Greenwich Village, leaving when the building was scheduled for demolition to make way for the Broadway–Seventh Avenue subway. In 1932 they moved to an apartment on Park Avenue. Lewis was named literary trustee of Cather's estate, and the scholar Melissa Homestead has argued that she was part of Cather's creative process rather than a secretary for her papers.
Scholars disagree about how to describe Cather's sexual identity. Some hold that the question cannot be settled without imposing later categories on her, and others reject that position. What is not disputed is that her closest relationships throughout her adult life were with women: her college friend Louise Pound, the Pittsburgh socialite Isabelle McClung, the opera singer Olive Fremstad, and Lewis. The 566 letters published in 2013 as The Selected Letters of Willa Cather disclose no intimate detail, but they make clear that her primary emotional attachments were to women.
From 1922 Cather spent her summers on Grand Manan, an island in the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick. She bought a cottage at Whale Cove that had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing, and anyone who wanted to reach her had to send a telegram or a letter. Her story “Before Breakfast” is set on the island. She stopped going in 1940, when Canada's entry into the Second World War made the journey much harder, and gall bladder surgery in 1942 limited her movements further.
Cather lost two people close to her in 1938. Her brother Douglass died of a heart attack in June, and she was too stricken with grief to attend the funeral. Isabelle McClung died four months later. McClung had married the musician Jan Hambourg and moved with him to Toronto, but the friendship held, and Cather wrote that Isabelle was the person for whom she wrote all her books.
Cather began as a journalist and drew a firm line between the two trades. Journalism existed to inform, she thought, and literature was an art. Her fiction is built on place. Land, the frontier and the western landscape recur throughout it, and even when a heroine is set down in a city the surroundings do the work. My Mortal Enemy shows power through the layout of rooms and the furniture in them.
Her style is plain and lucid rather than experimental. Critics have faulted her for not using techniques such as stream of consciousness. One summary of her position calls it a middle ground between the reporter who piles up more fact than any character could notice and the psychological novelist whose subjective viewpoint distorts what is really there. She selected facts from experience on the basis of feeling, then set them down plainly. She respected the work of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce and saw no reason to follow it.
Her material came from listening. As a girl she visited the immigrant families around Red Cloud and came home, she said, in “the most unreasonable state of excitement”, feeling that she “had got inside another person's skin”. Most of her major characters live as exiles, and it is through their dealings with the land around them that they find a community. Susan J. Rosowski wrote that Cather was perhaps the first writer to give immigrants a respectable position in American literature.
She read narrowly and chose her models. Cather admired Henry James for his language and his characters, and praised Katherine Mansfield's ability “to throw a luminous streak out onto the shadowy realm of personal relationships”. She enjoyed George Eliot, the Brontës and Jane Austen, but judged most women writers overly sentimental. The exception was Sarah Orne Jewett, who became her friend and mentor. Jewett told her to write about her own country, and O Pioneers! carries a dedication to Jewett. Jewett also urged her to use female narrators, which Cather resisted, preferring male ones.
The prairie novels were praised for using plain language about ordinary people. Sinclair Lewis said Cather had made Nebraska accessible to the wider world for the first time. After finishing The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald complained that his own novel was a failure beside My Ántonia.
One of Ours drew hard criticism as well as the Pulitzer. Her close friend Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant thought the novel betrayed the realities of war, and could not reconcile Cather's idealised version with her own experience of it. Ernest Hemingway wrote in a 1923 letter that the novel's last battle scene came from the film The Birth of a Nation. He said he had identified episode after episode, and that Cather had to get her war experience somewhere.
In the 1930s a growing share of critics called her romantic and nostalgic. Granville Hicks accused her of escaping into an idealised past instead of facing the problems of the present, and during the Depression her work was widely held to lack social relevance. Her conservative politics had appealed to H. L. Mencken, Randolph Bourne and Carl Van Doren, and soured her reputation with younger left-leaning critics such as Hicks and Edmund Wilson. Not every scholar accepts the label. Some read her instead as a rural populist, and some as a progressive.
Readers stayed with her through the critical turn. Shadows on the Rock was the most widely read novel in the United States in 1931, and Lucy Gayheart was a bestseller in 1935. The English novelist A. S. Byatt has written that Cather reinvented the form of the novel with each book, in order to examine how the human condition changes over time.
The honours continued after her death. Cather entered the Nebraska Hall of Fame in 1962, the Hall of Great Westerners in 1974, the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in 1986 and the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1988. The United States Postal Service issued a stamp for her in 1973. In 2023 Nebraska gave a bronze of Cather by Littleton Alston to the National Statuary Hall Collection, and it stands in the Capitol Visitor Center in Washington.
Cather and Lewis went to Grand Manan for the last time in the summer of 1940, and there she finished Sapphira and the Slave Girl. It was much darker in tone and subject than the books before it. The advance printing ran to 25,000 copies, and the Book of the Month Club took more than 200,000. Her last story, “The Best Years”, was written as a gift for her brother and gathered images from each of her twelve novels and from Obscure Destinies.
An inflamed tendon in her hand made writing hard, but she completed a substantial part of a novel called Hard Punishments, set in fourteenth-century Avignon during the reign of Antipope Benedict XIV. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943. In the same year she signed a will that forbade the publication of her letters and the dramatisation of her work. She had already destroyed many drafts, papers and letters, and had asked others to destroy theirs. Some complied and some did not.
In 1944 the National Institute of Arts and Letters gave her its gold medal for fiction, an award made for a writer's whole body of work. Doctors found breast cancer in December 1945, and she had a mastectomy on 14 January 1946. By early 1947 the cancer had spread to her liver.
Willa Cather died of a cerebral hemorrhage on 24 April 1947, at the age of 73, in her apartment at 570 Park Avenue in Manhattan. Edith Lewis destroyed the manuscript of Hard Punishments, as Cather had instructed. Cather is buried in the southwest corner of the Old Burying Ground at Jaffrey, New Hampshire, a town she first came to when visiting Isabelle McClung and Jan Hambourg at the Shattuck Inn. Lewis was buried beside her about twenty-five years later.
Born Wilella Sibert Cather on 7 December, on her grandmother's farm near Winchester, Virginia.
Moves with her family from Virginia to Webster County, Nebraska, and soon after into the town of Red Cloud.
Graduates from Red Cloud High School at sixteen and enrols at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.
Moves to Pittsburgh to write for Home Monthly, and later teaches Latin and English in the city's high schools.
Publishes her first book, a collection of poems called April Twilights.
Joins McClure's Magazine and moves to New York, her main home for the rest of her life.
Begins sharing a New York apartment with the editor Edith Lewis, with whom she lived until her death.
Publishes O Pioneers!, the first of the three novels set on the Nebraska plains.
Publishes My Ántonia, whose title character is modelled on her Red Cloud friend Annie Sadilek Pavelka.
Leaves Houghton Mifflin for Alfred A. Knopf after a dispute over the making and advertising of My Ántonia.
Wins the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, her novel set during the First World War.
Publishes Death Comes for the Archbishop, which sells 86,500 copies in two years.
Loses her brother Douglass in June and her friend Isabelle McClung four months later.
Publishes Sapphira and the Slave Girl, her last completed novel, and visits Grand Manan for the last time.
Signs a will forbidding the publication of her letters and the dramatisation of her work.
Dies of a cerebral hemorrhage on 24 April at her Park Avenue apartment in Manhattan, aged 73.
Corresponded with
F. Scott Fitzgerald is among the literary correspondents whose letters from Cather appear in The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, the 566-letter collection published in 2013. After finishing The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald complained that his own novel was a failure beside My Ántonia.
Willa Cather (1873–1947) was an American novelist known for her books about settlers and immigrant families on the Great Plains. She grew up in Red Cloud, Nebraska, studied at the University of Nebraska, and worked as a journalist, magazine editor and schoolteacher before publishing her first novel in 1912. Her best-known books are O Pioneers! (1913), My Ántonia (1918) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours.
Cather moved from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when she was nine, and grew up in the prairie town of Red Cloud. The immigrant farming families she met there became the subject of O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915) and My Ántonia (1918). Sinclair Lewis said she had made Nebraska accessible to the wider world for the first time. She made her last visit to Red Cloud in 1931 and sent money to friends there during the Depression.
She won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during the First World War. The book divided readers. Her friend Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant thought it misrepresented the war, and Ernest Hemingway wrote privately in 1923 that its final battle scene came from the film The Birth of a Nation. It was her only Pulitzer, though the National Institute of Arts and Letters gave her its gold medal for fiction in 1944.
Edith Lewis was a magazine editor who lived with Willa Cather for the last thirty-nine years of Cather's life. They shared New York apartments from 1908 until Cather's death in 1947, including No. 5 Bank Street in Greenwich Village from 1913 to 1927. Lewis was named literary trustee of Cather's estate, and the scholar Melissa Homestead has argued she was part of Cather's creative process rather than a secretary. Lewis was buried beside Cather at Jaffrey, New Hampshire, about twenty-five years after her.
Cather destroyed drafts, papers and letters through her life and asked her correspondents to do the same, and her 1943 will banned the publication of her letters. Some complied and some did not. Hundreds of letters she had written to Isabelle McClung were returned to her by McClung's husband, and almost all of those were destroyed. In April 2013, two years after the death of her nephew and second literary executor Charles Cather, 566 letters appeared as The Selected Letters of Willa Cather. The Willa Cather Archive at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln had made about 2,100 letters freely available by 2021.
Willa Cather died of a cerebral hemorrhage on 24 April 1947, aged 73, at her apartment at 570 Park Avenue in Manhattan. Doctors had found breast cancer in December 1945, and she had a mastectomy on 14 January 1946. By early 1947 the cancer had spread to her liver. Edith Lewis destroyed the manuscript of the unfinished novel Hard Punishments, following Cather's instructions. Cather is buried in the Old Burying Ground at Jaffrey, New Hampshire.
Corresponded with
F. Scott Fitzgerald is among the literary correspondents whose letters from Cather appear in The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, the 566-letter collection published in 2013. After finishing The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald complained that his own novel was a failure beside My Ántonia.
The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Willa Cather and their work.
Reference article cross-checked for the biography, the publishing history, the criticism, and the death.
Encyclopaedia Britannica's biography, used to confirm dates and the outline of her career.
The University of Nebraska–Lincoln's digital archive of Cather's letters and published writing.
The Pulitzer Prizes' record of the 1923 award for the novel One of Ours.
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