Willa Cather

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Standard Name: Cather, Willa
Birth Name: Wilella Cather
Self-constructed Name: Willa Cather
Self-constructed Name: Willa Love Cather
Self-constructed Name: Willa Sibert Cather
WC ranks as one of the major American novelists of the earlier twentieth century, and her popularity has remained undiminished while her critical reputation has fluctuated. She was a highly professional journalist and reviewer before she embarked on fiction, and she also published poetry, short stories, and ghosted biographies. Her fame rests on her rendering of the Midwest of pioneer days, but her strong imaginative sense of place also produced memorable novels with different geographical and historical settings.
Black and white, three-quarter-length photo of Willa Cather, c. 1912, sitting facing the camera with her hands on the arms of her Renaissance-style chair. She is wearing a hat with a turned-up brim holding a plume of white feathers; her blouse and jacket are black. She has a short pendant at her throat, and a long, tasselled necklace which came to her from Sarah Orne Jewett.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Alice Munro
After it won the O. Henry Prize (in the first year in which Canadians were eligible for this award) Munro described the genesis of the title story in an actual occurrence where a woman and...
Education Tillie Olsen
At home the Lerner children learned Yiddish songs and made up silly plays.
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press.
27
Tillie was a difficult child, skipping family chores to spend time at the public library, with its huge painting of...
Textual Features Adrienne Rich
In Culture and Anarchy (titled after the famous essay collection by Matthew Arnold , 1869 ), Rich mixes her own poetry with the words of nineteenth-century Anglo-American women writers Jane Addams , Susan B. Anthony
Reception Christina Stead
In 1974 Stead won the $6,000 Patrick White Literary Award, which White had set up with his own Nobel Prize money, targeted chiefly at older and under-appreciated Australian writers. When Saul Bellow received the Nobel...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Cather, Willa. The Troll Garden. McClure, Phillips, 1905.
Cather, Willa. Youth and the Bright Medusa. A. A. Knopf, 1920.