39 Facts About Willa Cather

1.

Willa Cather spent the last 39 years of her life with her domestic partner, Edith Lewis, before being diagnosed with breast cancer and dying of a cerebral hemorrhage.

2.

Willa Cather is buried beside Lewis in a Jaffrey, New Hampshire plot.

3.

Willa Cather achieved recognition as a novelist of the frontier and pioneer experience.

4.

Willa Cather wrote of the spirit of those settlers moving into the western states, many of them European immigrants in the nineteenth century.

5.

Willa Cather was born in 1873 on her maternal grandmother's farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia.

6.

The Willa Cather family originated in Wales, the name deriving from Cadair Idris, a Gwynedd mountain.

7.

Willa Cather's mother was Mary Virginia Boak, a former school teacher.

8.

Mary Cather had six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass, Jessica, James, John, and Elsie.

9.

At the urging of Charles Cather's parents, the family moved to Nebraska in 1883 when Willa was nine years old.

10.

Willa Cather's father tried his hand at farming for eighteen months, then 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.

11.

In 1890, at the age of sixteen, Willa Cather graduated from Red Cloud High School.

12.

Willa Cather changed her plans from studying science to become a physician, instead graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1895.

13.

Willa Cather's time in Nebraska, still considered a frontier state, was a formative experience for her: She was moved by the dramatic environment and weather, the vastness of the prairie, and the various cultures of the immigrant and Native American families in the area.

14.

In 1896, Willa Cather was hired to write for a women's magazine, Home Monthly, and moved to Pittsburgh.

15.

Shortly after moving to Pittsburgh, Willa Cather wrote short stories, including publishing "Tommy, the Unsentimental" in the Home Monthly, about a Nebraskan girl with a masculine name who looks like a boy and saves her father's bank business.

16.

Willa Cather contributed to the series, but there has been some debate as to how much.

17.

Willa Cather liked the look of its books and had been impressed with its edition of Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson.

18.

Willa Cather followed this up with the popular Death Comes for the Archbishop in 1927, selling 86,500 copies in just two years, and which has been included on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the twentieth century.

19.

Willa Cather was invited to give several hundred lectures to the public, earned significant royalties, and sold the movie rights to A Lost Lady.

20.

In 1932, Willa Cather published Obscure Destinies, her final collection of short fiction, which contained "Neighbour Rosicky", one of her most highly regarded stories.

21.

Willa Cather wrote that Isabelle was the person for whom she wrote all her books.

22.

Willa Cather had titled it Hard Punishments and placed it in the 14th century during the reign of Antipope Benedict XIV.

23.

Willa Cather was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943.

24.

Willa Cather was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 1945 and underwent a mastectomy on January 14,1946.

25.

About a year later, on April 24,1947, Willa Cather died of a cerebral hemorrhage, at the age of 73, in her home at 570 Park Avenue in Manhattan.

26.

Researcher Deborah Carlin suggests that denial of Willa Cather being a lesbian is rooted in treating same-sex desire "as an insult to Willa Cather and her reputation", rather than a neutral historical perspective.

27.

Willa Cather valued the seclusion of the island and did not mind that her cottage had neither indoor plumbing nor electricity.

28.

Willa Cather's will restricted the ability of scholars to quote from the personal papers that remain.

29.

Willa Cather's correspondence revealed the complexity of her character and inner world.

30.

Willa Cather was likewise fascinated by the French-Canadian pioneers from Quebec who had settled in the Red Cloud area while she was a girl.

31.

The French influence is found in many other Willa Cather works, including Death Comes for the Archbishop and her final, unfinished novel set in Avignon, Hard Punishments.

32.

Willa Cather had formed and matured her ideas on art before she wrote a novel.

33.

Willa Cather had no more reason to follow Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, whose work she respected, than they did to follow her.

34.

Willa Cather's style solves the problems in which she was interested.

35.

Willa Cather 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.

36.

Willa Cather 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.

37.

Byatt has written that with each work Willa Cather reinvented the novel form to investigate the changes in the human condition over time.

38.

Particularly in her frontier novels, Willa Cather wrote of both the beauty and terror of life.

39.

Susan J Rosowski wrote that Cather was perhaps the first to grant immigrants a respectable position in American literature.