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
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, 2010.
27
Tillie was a difficult child, skipping family chores to spend time at the public library, with its huge painting of...
Friends, Associates Dorothy Brett
Travelling to Taos the first time in Lawrence's company, Brett had met Willa Cather and Harriet Monroe .
Brett, Dorothy. Lawrence and Brett. J. B. Lippincott Company, 1933.
39-40
On the whole, however, she did not pursue literary friendships in the USA. She continued her...
Friends, Associates Sarah Orne Jewett
SOJ had a broad social circle. She belonged to an artistic community of women that included Celia Thaxter and Louise Guiney , and counted Harriet Beecher Stowe (whose funeral she and Annie Fields attended in...
Intertextuality and Influence Alice Munro
Carried Away begins with two lonely young people building an unlikely relationship by letter. Louisa, town librarian of Carstairs, Ontario, in 1917, lives in a hotel and eats her solitary meal each day with...
Literary responses Katherine Mansfield
In this volume, as Willa Cather felt, KM issued a challenge to the literary world which showed her high and daring spirit.
Cather, Willa. On Writing. Editor Tennant, Stephen, Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.
113
But little more than a year after publishing it KM apparently thought...
Literary responses Katherine Mansfield
The contents of Murry's first journal edition were selected with an eye to keeping Mansfield acceptable to the public. Her biographer Alpers says it sealed her in porcelain for twenty years.
qtd. in
Alpers, Antony. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford University Press, 1982.
388
Willa Cather ...
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...
Literary responses Sarah Orne Jewett
Willa Cather judged the first two of these collections, and Deephaven, to be full of perception and feeling, but rather fluid and formless.
Cather, Willa. On Writing. Editor Tennant, Stephen, Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.
48
Literary responses Sarah Orne Jewett
Willa Cather , in her preface to a collection of SOJ 's Best Stories (1925), reflected a common critical perception in suggesting that Jewett would go down in literary history as a regional writer: the...
Literary responses Katherine Mansfield
Reviews mentioned KM 's caustic and observant descriptions, her freedom from sentimentality, and her peculiar touch of impishness. Some, however, found her coarse.
Alpers, Antony. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford University Press, 1982.
129
Willa Cather later recalled how discerning readers of this first volume...
Occupation Eva Figes
EF had a long stint as co-editor of this series, which includes works on Margaret Atwood , Jane Austen , Elizabeth Bowen , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Frances Burney , Willa Cather , Colette ,...
Reception Emily Faithfull
Historian Martha Vicinus reads EF 's novel as a keyed text in which Faithfull cast herself as a man in order to speak and do in public what might be considered improper for a woman—the...
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...
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
Textual Production Katherine Mansfield
The Woolfs were eager to publish it. Virginia , who had encouraged Mansfield to get it finished,
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
wrote of it in her diary: It has the living power, the detached existence of a work of...

Timeline

1861: A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued...

Writing climate item

1861

A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued what seems to be the earliest version of a game called Authors, whose object was to collect sets of cards bearing the names of writers and the...

29 August 1907: More than eighty workers were killed when...

National or international item

29 August 1907

More than eighty workers were killed when a main compression chamber failed and the south arm of a bridge being built across the St Lawrence at Quebec collapsed.
Lindemann, Marilee, and Willa Cather. “Introduction, Chronology”. Alexander’s Bridge, edited by Marilee Lindemann and Marilee Lindemann, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. vii - xliv.
xvi

By 20 September 1953: Saul Bellow published The Adventures of Augie...

Writing climate item

By 20 September 1953

Saul Bellow published The Adventures of Augie March. Martin Amis , in later hailing this as the first American novel to show an immigrant as a rightful Discoverer, or a pioneer,
Borne Back Daily. 2001, http://borneback.com/ .
21 October 2008

May 1978: Virago Press issued its first Virago Modern...

Women writers item

May 1978

Virago Press issued its first Virago Modern Classics, a historically important series most though not all of which were novels.
Callil, Carmen. “The stories of our lives”. Guardian Unlimited, 26 Apr. 2008.

Texts

Cather, Willa. “A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather”. The Willa Cather Archive, edited by Andrew Jewell et al.
Cather, Willa. A Lost Lady. First, Alfred A. Knopf, 1923.
Cather, Willa. A Lost Lady. Virago, 2000.
Cather, Willa. Alexander’s Bridge. Houghton Mifflin, 1912.
Cather, Willa. Alexander’s Bridge. Editor Lindemann, Marilee, Oxford University Press, 1997.
Cather, Willa. April Twilights. R. G. Badger, 1903.
Cather, Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop. Alfred A. Knopf, 1927.
Byatt, A. S., and Willa Cather. “Introduction”. A Lost Lady, Virago, 2000, p. v - xiv.
Lindemann, Marilee, and Willa Cather. “Introduction, Chronology”. Alexander’s Bridge, edited by Marilee Lindemann and Marilee Lindemann, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. vii - xliv.
Urgo, Joseph R., and Willa Cather. “Introduction. Willa Cather: A Brief Chronology. A Note on the Text”. My Ántonia, edited by Joseph R. Urgo and Joseph R. Urgo, Broadview Press, 2003, pp. 9-39.
Cather, Willa. Lucy Gayheart. Alfred A. Knopf, 1935.
Cather, Willa. My Ántonia. Houghton Mifflin, 1918.
Cather, Willa. My Ántonia. Editor Urgo, Joseph R., Broadview Press, 2003.
Cather, Willa. My Mortal Enemy. A. A. Knopf, 1926.
Cather, Willa. Not Under Forty. A. A. Knopf, 1936.
Cather, Willa. O Pioneers!. Houghton Mifflin, 1913.
Cather, Willa. O Pioneers!. Houghton Mifflin, 1954.
Cather, Willa. Obscure Destinies. Alfred A. Knopf, 1932.
Cather, Willa. On Writing. Editor Tennant, Stephen, Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.
Cather, Willa. One of Ours. A. A. Knopf, 1922.
Cather, Willa, and Sarah Orne Jewett. “Preface”. The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, edited by Willa Cather and Willa Cather, Peter Smith, 1965, p. ix - xix.
Cather, Willa. Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Alfred A. Knopf, 1940.
Cather, Willa. Shadows on the Rock. Alfred A. Knopf, 1931.
Jewett, Sarah Orne. The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett. Editor Cather, Willa, Peter Smith, 1965, 2 vols.
Cather, Willa. The Professor’s House. A. A. Knopf, 1925.