Birthday: the Bard of Red Cloud

Willa Sibert Cather (1873-1947)
Author

Recipient, The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1923; Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Letters, 1943; National Institute of Arts & Letters Gold Medal, 1944

One of seven children, Cather spent her first nine years in the family home at Winchester, Virginia. Her father, keen to make his fortune out west and escape the periodic TB outbreaks in the Virginia mountains, moved the family to a spread in Red Cloud, Nebraska. At age eleven she became a rural mail carrier, exploring the expanses of Webster County and absorbing the varied cultures of the largely immigrant settlers.

A voracious reader, Willa was given the run of the large personal library of the local doctor, and determined she, too, would get her medical degree. But after her essay on Thomas Carlyle was published, she changed course, graduated the University of Nebraska with a degree in English, and moved to Pittsburgh to be a writer.

There, Cather wrote copy for Home Monthly, a Ladies Home Journal wannabe, and for a local newspaper; she also taught school without much like for it.

Her first collection of short stories came out in 1905; on the strength of it, a larger magazine- McClure’s- hired her to New York. McClure’s gave her a platform. After a serialized life of Mary Baker Eddy, the magazine published her first novel in 1912.

Cather, on a roll, published her great Prairie Trilogy over the rest of the ‘10s: O’ Pioneers! in 1913; The Song of the Lark in 1915; My Antonia in 1918. The series settled her in the front rank of American authors through the 1920s. Her novels were a marked contrast to the complex social relationships and plots of European fiction, which she called “over-furnished” (even as she adored the work of the Europeans Henry James, Balzac, Tolstoy, and Flaubert).

The Crash of 1929 and the social upheavals of the Depression changed everything, including the arts. In just a few years, a new generation of left-leaning critics and authors rose up; Cather went from cutting edge to the darling of retrogrades like H.L. Mencken. Her work was belittled as hopelessly nostalgic, her style too traditional. Though she continued publishing, her standing and sales declined, and she became a semi-recluse, burning papers and letters and spending more and more time at a Canadian island hideaway. She put restrictions on the use of her papers in her will, and her reputation was jealously guarded by Edith Lewis, her first literary executor, and her nephew, Charles Cather.

Cather never married, and, in the modern rage to sign up every author on either the gay team or the straight one, she has been trapped in a scholarly tug of war for decades. In college, she dressed in mannish clothing and went by the nickname ‘William.’ She didn’t think much of women as writers, other than Katherine Mansfield and Sarah Orne Jewett, who advised her to include more women as lead characters in her books (she rejected the suggestion).

From 1909 to her death, Cather lived with her friend Edith Lewis; the two are buried together in New Hampshire. In 2013 a collection of over five hundred of her surviving letters was published, indicating, among other things, that her primary affections were toward women.

Of course, what that proves is, truly largely of academic interest. Cather memorialized frontier life in an era of great change, from the uneasy intermixing of immigrant cultures on the Great Plains to the second generation, “who were reared amid hardships, and it is perhaps natural that they should be very much interested in material comfort, in buying whatever is expensive and ugly.” She saw rural Nebraskans succumbing to the enticements of manufacture, the beginnings of a consumer society, and commented, “The generation now in the driver’s seat hates to make anything, wants to live and die in an automobile, scudding past those acres where the old men used to follow the long cornrows up and down. They want to buy everything ready-made: clothes, food, education, music, pleasure.” She wondered, in her 1923 essay, if the generations of the future will be fooled. Will they believe, she asks, “that to live easily is to live happily?”

Her concern was prescient: over the century since, her hometown as declined from the 1800 people she knew in her youth to under a thousand.

Cather found her voice, and wrote what she knew.  Recent decades have vindicated her; Cather’s works remain popular, five of her novels remain in regular circulation and her collected stories are supplemented by the discovery and publication of more of her stories in the magazines of a century ago.

Cather’s last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) was a critical and commercial success, but a marked departure from her previous work in its portrayal of a young woman devoid of moral compass. The coming of the second world war deeply discouraged her; she wondered, in a letter, if there was any future for people of her generation. Her health failed gradually and she died of a stroke in 1947.

In 1986, Willa Cather was posthumously inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame and Museum.


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