About the Author

Of Irish descent, Willa Cather was born on December 7, 1873, in Virginia, the eldest child of Charles and Mary Boak Cather. Before her tenth birth day, she moved with her family to join her grandparents in Webster County, Nebraska, and a year later, in 1884, they settled in Red Cloud. While attending the University of Nebraska in 1892, Willa published her first short story, "Peter," in a Boston magazine.

In 1896, Willa Cather accepted a post as editor for the Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, Home Monthly, supplementing her income with reviews for the Pittsburg Leader. After a brief teaching appointment in the Pittsburg public schools in 1901, she traveled to Europe for a year, returning to bright literary prospects. In 1903, she published April Twilights, her first collection of poetry, and in 1905, The Troll Garden, an anthology of her short stories. In 1906 she moved to New York where she accepted the post with McClure's Magazine, a publication for which, in time, she would serve as the managing editor. Two years later, she met Maine local colorist, Sarah Orne Jewett, who encouraged her to draw upon her Nebraska experiences. Three years later, Cather wrote The Bohemian Girl and began O Pioneers!

A trip through the United States Southwest in 1912 set within Cather a deep fascination for North American indigenous life and an affection for the whole Southwestern milieu. In the same year, she published Alexander's Bridge, followed by O Pioneers! in 1913. She continued her travels throughout the American West with visits to Mesa Verde in Colorado, and excursions to Wyoming and the far West. She published The Song of the Lark in 1915 and, from New Hampshire, began the draft of My Antonia which she published in 1918.

The decades of the 1920's and ‘30's were to be the most prolific of Cather's career. Youth and the Bright Medusa appeared in 1920. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1923 work, One of Ours, published in the same year as A Lost Lady. Three works then followed in quick succession: The Professor's House (1925), My Mortal Enemy (1926), and then one of her best known works of the American Southwest, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) for which she received the "Howells" medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1930.

The 1930's witnessed the release of a range of Cather works. She published Shadows on the Rock in 1931, and Obscure Destinies, a collection of three short stories, appeared in 1932. Lucy Gayheart (1935), a series of essays, Not Under Forty (1936), a novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1938), and The Best Years (1945) round out the canon of Willa Cather's literature.

Willa Cather's novels are often praised for their lucid style and sensitive portrayal of characters in search of self-expression and spiritual wholeness. A religious person herself, she empathized with the mysticism of the Southwest and the role that religion plays in communities bound by a common faith, attributes particularly integral in Death Comes for the Archbishop. Her love of music, particularly opera, also informs several of her works, especially in the talents of her character, Thea Kronborg, in The Song of the Lark.

The recipient of wide acclaim, both in the United States and Europe, Willa Cather achieved success as both a writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism. She was the first writer to receive the "Prix Femina Américane" in 1933. In addition to her Pulitzer Prize and the Howells Award, at 71 she received the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. At the close of a remarkable career, Willa Cather died in 1947 and was laid to rest in New Hampshire.