: 3 Her mother was Mary Virginia Boak, a former school teacher. The Cather family originated in Wales, the name deriving from Cadair Idris, a Gwynedd mountain. Willa Cather Childhood Home, Red Cloud, NebraskaĬather was born in 1873 on her maternal grandmother's farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia. A sense of place is an important element in Cather's fiction: physical landscapes and domestic spaces are for Cather dynamic presences against which her characters struggle and find community. Common themes in her work include nostalgia and exile. She wrote of the spirit of those settlers moving into the western states, many of them European immigrants in the nineteenth century. She is buried beside Lewis in a Jaffrey, New Hampshire plot.Ĭather achieved recognition as a novelist of the frontier and pioneer experience. She 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. At the age of 33, she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. Shortly after graduating from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Cather moved to Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. The family later settled in the town of Red Cloud. Willa Cather and her family moved from Virginia to Webster County, Nebraska, when she was nine years old. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I. Willa Sibert Cather ( / ˈ k æ ð ər/ born Wilella Sibert Cather Decem – April 24, 1947) was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia.

Willa cather pioneer trilogy