Willa Sibert Cather (1873–1947,) born Wilella Cather, was a novelist and short-story writer considered one of the greatest twentieth-century American authors. Her works explore the pioneer spirit: love of the land, loyalty to family, and the struggle with nature. Her books, often portraying strong characters who lead a life as a noble endeavor, are renowned for their energetic and sensitive evocations of prairie life in the twilight years of the Midwestern frontier.
Cather was born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia. Her family moved to a farm in Nebraska. The splendor of the prairie and her friendships with Bohemian and Scandinavian immigrant-farmer families provided her with both the material and an unadorned manner of expression she later used in her novels. Cather started college at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, set on becoming a doctor. She decided to become a writer after one of her professors sent in an essay of hers without her knowledge, and it was published.
Cather first worked as an editor, drama critic, and high school teacher in Pittsburgh. In 1904, she relocated to New York City, where she published her first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden (1905,) and became managing editor of McClure’s Magazine. Her works include O Pioneers! (1913,) My Antonia (1918,) One of Ours (1922; Pulitzer,) The Professor’s House (1925,) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927,) generally regarded as her masterpiece.
In her final years, Cather devoted herself to literary criticism. Not Under Forty (1936) contains an eloquent expression of her philosophy of writing; this tome is also known for Cather’s debt to another pioneer, the novelist Sarah Orne Jewett.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Willa Cather
The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Censorship
Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
—Willa Cather
The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Miracles
Prayers said by good people are always good prayers.
—Willa Cather
Where there is great love, there are always miracles.
—Willa Cather
Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family —but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Solitude, Friends and Friendship, Friendship
Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Words
What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself.
—Willa Cather
No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Security
Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand—a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
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