Willa Cather

Throughout her life, Cather was friends with women and used to be constantly in their company. Her sexual orientation is still a point of speculation for historians and intellectuals. She lived with a woman for 39 years of her life.

She started living with Edith Lewis, an editor, in 1900 and they both lived together in New York from 1908 until her death. She chose Edith Lewis as her literary trustee for her personal estate.

Cather died in 1947 due to cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 73. She is buried at a spot that she selected for herself before she died––on a hillside spot in New Hampshire.

Willa Cather was born on December 7, 1873 to Charles Fectigue Ctaher and Mary Virginia Boak in her maternal grandmother’s farm in Back Creek valley, Winchester, Virginia. Her mother was a schoolteacher and right after Willa’s birth the family moved to Willow Shade.

IN 1883, when Cather was 9 years old, her family moved to Nebraska where her father tried his hand at farming but gave up on it and move to Red Cloud and established a real estate and insurance agency instead. It was during this period that the children attended school for the first time.

The time that Cather spent in Nebraska was a deeply formative experience for her as she was intensely moved by the environment, weather, and the various cultures of the European-American, immigrant and Native American families in the area.

She had six more siblings and it is said that she had always been closer to her brothers than her sisters.

In 1890, she graduated from the high school and went to Lincoln, Nebraska, where she entered a Latin School that prepared her for the university admission.

In 1892, she became the literary editor of ‘The Hesperian’ and her writings kept getting published - her story ‘Peter’ got published in The Mahogany Tree, which became her first published fiction.

While still being the literary editor at the Hesperian, she contributed her writings to the ‘Nebraska State Journal’ on a regular basis and also wrote a regular Sunday column in the journal throughout 1893.

In 1895 she was still getting published in the ‘Nebraska State Journal’, also contributing to the various publications in her university and graduated from the University of Nebraska in the same year.

She had her fiction published in ‘Overland Monthly’ and ‘Nebraska Literary Magazine’ in 1896. She moved to Pittsburg in the same year to become editor of a family magazine called the ‘Home Monthly’.

She moved back to the Red Cloud and kept making contributions to the ‘Nebraska State Journal’ and wrote for her column, ‘The Passing Show’, all through 1897. In the same year she was offered a job in the ‘Pittsburgh Leader’.

Cather received a Pulitzer Prize for her novel ‘One of Ours’ in 1923. The novel is set around the time of war in Nebraska. The main protagonist is shown going through moral confusion and a deep seated melancholy.

In 1944, Cather received a gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. It is institute’s highest award and is only given to the literary figures who have done great work over the years.