Willa Cather

Willa Cather was an American novelist whose My Ántonia and O Pioneers! captured the beauty and hardship of the Great Plains immigrant experience with enduring lyrical power.

Willa Cather grew up in Nebraska after her family moved from Virginia when she was nine, and the prairie landscape — its scale, its seasonal extremes, and the immigrant communities who were transforming it — became the central subject of her greatest fiction. She worked as a journalist and editor in Pittsburgh and New York before publishing O Pioneers! in 1913, the first of the three Prairie Novels that secured her reputation. The book follows Alexandra Bergson and her Swedish immigrant family on the Nebraska Divide, and it is remarkable for the authority with which Cather renders both the physical world and the emotional lives of people who do not typically appear in American literary fiction.

My Ántonia (1918) is generally considered her masterpiece — a novel narrated by Jim Burden, who tells the story of Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant girl whose life unfolds across the novel’s arc from childhood innocence to hardworking adulthood. The novel’s structure is deliberately loose, more reminiscent of memory than of conventional plotting, and Cather uses that looseness to convey the texture of life as it is actually experienced: episodic, beautiful in patches, suffused with loss. The book’s final images of Ántonia surrounded by her children and her land have a cumulative emotional power that the conventional plot summary cannot capture.

Cather’s other major works include The Professor’s House, Death Comes for the Archbishop (her most formally inventive novel), and The Song of the Lark. She was a private person whose personal life — she lived for nearly forty years with the editor Edith Lewis, and her relationship to her own identity was complex — has been the subject of increasing scholarly attention. Her prose style, influenced by her love of French literature, is clear and precise with an elegiac undertow. She is one of the essential American novelists.