My Reactions

My Antonia

A short summary and discussion on immigrants life and the separation of country and city life of the time period

O Pioneers!

Summary and discussion of the women's role and ownership of farm land of the time period

Other web pages

Biography

Willa Sibert Cather is one of the most distinguished American women in early twentieth-century fiction. She wrote most of her major works during the time of World War I and felt that the world had split in two after 1922 and that she "belonged to the earlier half." As the book of Contemporary Authors said, "Her writings reflect a desire to withdraw from the modern world into the refuge of a stable past." Born in the Shenandoah Balley region of Virginia, she moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska at the age of nine, and this setting was the inspiration for much of her writing, and depicted the harsh life of pioneering immigrant farmers who settled in the prairies. Two of her well-known novels that demonstrates this are two books that I have read, O Pioneers! and My Antonia. The land is an important part of several of her best works and frequently the inspiration for her poetry that she wrote early on in her career. It is in her descriptive passages that Cather's prose style is at its most eloquent, capturing the landscapes with vivid imagery in colors, physical features, and shifting moods. In O Pioneers! and My Antonia the unique beauty of the prairie landscape is felt throughout the stories, while Death Comes for the Archbiship and The Professor's House both give striking portratis of the Southwest. In 1890, at the age of sixteen, Cather left Red Cloud for Lincoln and the University of Nebraska, where she was known as one of its brightest and most individualistic students. She was said to be self-confident and sometimes aloof in her manner, and was already beginning to establish herself as a writer by being a contributor to the campus' two literary magazines. After graduating Cather moved to Pittsburgh, where she lived with her close friend Isabelle McClung. Many gay rights groups say that their relationship was on a higher level and use Cather as a symbol for their cause. I think that Cather's attitudes for women are apparent in her writing, such as the individualism and strengh in the character Alexandra in O Pioneers! Later Cather moved to New York and became the leading magazine editor of her day and served as managing editor of McClure's Magazine from 1906-1912. She continued her education and received a doctrate at the University of Nebraska in 1917. She also received honorary degrees from the University of Michigan, the University of California, and from Columbia, Yale, and Princeton. She won many awards, including the Gold Metal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, One of Ours in 1922. Cather was the first woman voted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame (1961) and was also inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners in Oklahoma City in 1974, and into the National Women's Hall of Fame in new York in 1988. Today she is considered a great American Women, and the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Education Foundation preserve her childhood home and other buildings connected with her writings in Red Cloud, Nebraska.