Willa 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.