The Road is All: Remembering Willa Cather

The Road is All: Remembering Willa Cather December 7, 2016

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Personally I’m not one of those folk who re-read novels. Said, as someone who the other day picked up Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop for a second read. Perhaps it should count that I first read it fifteen, possibly twenty years ago. It is one of those rare things that hangs in the memory like a faint perfume, rich with innuendo, half a dream.

And then I notice that today is also Ms Cather’s birthday. Just a delight. Wilella Sibert Cather was born on the 7th of December, 1873, on a family farm in the Black Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia. When she was nine the family moved to Nebraska, where her father first farmed, then moved the family into the town of Red Cloud where he worked selling real estate and insurance.

Originally she set her eye to medicine, but the literary bug hit her during college, and she changed her major to English literature, graduating with a BA in from the University of Nebraska in 1894. She worked briefly for a magazine in Pittsburgh, the following year went to the Pittsburgh Leader. Later she taught English at a High School. And then in 1906 moved to New York to work for McLure’s Magazine. There she wrote an extensive critical biography of Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science, which ran as a series in the magazine, and was her first book. (A co-author is credited, but she in fact wrote nearly the whole book). The magazine also serialized her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge.

Her next novel O Pioneers made her reputation. And she never turned back, becoming one of America’s principal writers. She remains in the pantheon to this day.

In college she sometimes called herself William, and dressed in men’s clothing. Throughout her life her closest friendships were with women. As she never made a statement about her sexual orientation, while many, maybe most scholars assume she was, it is in fact an open question. According to the Wikipedia article on her “Willa Cather’s correspondence revealed complexity of her character and inner world. The letters do not disclose any intimate details about Cather’s personal life, but they do ‘make clear that [her] primary emotional attachments were to women.'”

She was raised a Baptist, but converted to the Episcopal Church in 1922.

The Wikipedia article gives a nice summary of her writing. “The English novelist A. S. Byatt observes that with each work Cather reinvented the novel form ‘to look at a new human world.’ Byatt identifies some of Cather’s major themes as ‘the rising and setting of the sun, the brevity of life, the relation between dailiness and the rupture of dailiness, the moment when ‘desire shall fail’.’ Particularly in her frontier novels, Cather wrote of ‘life’s terrors … and its beauties’. Like the exiled characters of Henry James, an author who had a great influence on Cather, most of Cather’s major characters live as exiled immigrants, ‘people trying to make their way in circumstances strange to them’. Joseph Urgo in Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration says Cather felt a connection between the immigrants’ ‘sense of homelessness and exile’ and her own feelings of exile when she lived on the frontier. Susan Rosowski wrote that Cather was ‘the first to give immigrants heroic stature in serious American literature.'”

The winner of numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize, profoundly respected as one of the great novelists of her time, and, well, considered one of the greats, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage at 73, in her home in Manhattan, and died, on the 24th of April, 1947.

She was a gift to us all.

And I’m glad to be able to recall her today…


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