Willa Cather

Willa Cather was born near Winchester, Virginia, in 1873. In 1883, when she moved with her family to Catherton, Nebraska, and the following year the family relocated to nearby Red Cloud, Nebraska. There she grew up among the immigrants from Europe—Swedes, Bohemians, Russians, and Germans—who were breaking the land on the Great Plains. At the age of twenty-one she graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and spent the next few years doing newspaper work in Lincoln, Nebraska and teaching high school in Pittsburgh. In 1903 her first book, April Twilights, a collection of poems, was published, and two years later The Troll Garden, a collection of stories, appeared in print. After the publication of her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, in 1912, Cather left her position as managing editor at McClure's magazine and devoted herself fulltime to writing. Over the years, she completed eleven more novels (including O Pioneers!, My Antonia, The Professor's House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop), four collections of short stories, and two volumes of essays. Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours in 1923. She died in 1947.