Born on December 7, 1873, near Winchester, Virginia, Willa (originally Wilella) Cather moved with her family to frontier Nebraska when she was nine and grew up in the village of Red Cloud from the age of ten. In 1895 she graduated from the University of Nebraska. She was a journalist for a few years in Pittsburgh, managing and editing the Home Monthly magazine in 1896╨1897 and then reviewing drama and music for the Pittsburgh Daily Leader, and in 1901 she became a schoolteacher.
In 1903 Cather published a book of verse, April Twilights, and in 1905 a collection of short stories entitled The Troll Garden. The latter won her a position as managing editor of McClure╒s Magazine, where she remained until resigning in 1912 to devote herself entirely to writing. Her first novel, serialized in McClure╒s and then published as Alexander╒s Bridge, 1912, was a somewhat contrived work, but largely under the influence of the writer Sarah Orne Jewett she found her true literary inspiration in the frontier life of her childhood. O Pioneers!, 1913, and My Antonia, 1918, set the themes that were to infuse her best work, the heroic spirit of the Bohemian, Swedish, Russian, German, French, and other pioneers she had known and their conquest of hardships. One of Ours, 1922, won a Pulitzer Prize; that novel, like A Lost Lady, 1923, mourned the passing of the frontier and the virtues associated with it. The Song of the Lark, 1915, Youth and the Bright Medusa, 1920, and Lucy Gayheart, 1935, expressed the converse truth of the often stifling conventionality of small town life.
Cather╒s disillusionment with the values of the modern age deepened with the years and was reflected in The Professor╒s House, 1925, My Mortal Enemy, 1926, and in the essays collected in Not Under Forty, 1936. In Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927, and Shadows on the Rock, 1931, she turned to an earlier era, that of the French missionaries in America, to recapture a heroism lost to the modern world. Obscure Destinies, three stories, appeared in 1932, and in 1940 she published her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl. She died in New York City on April 24, 1947.
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