Willa Cather is perceived as one of the most outstanding American authors of the twentieth century. Although she became very successful, her writing years did not start with ease as she had trouble supporting herself through her writings. Cather drew from experience to make herself a better writer. This essay covers a portion of her life as a writer and what led her to becoming a well-known author. Willa Cather began her career in 1895 as an editor for the Home Monthly magazine in Pittsburgh. To forward her career, she left the magazine and found a job as a music and drama critic for the Pittsburgh Daily Leader in 1896. During this time, Cather found her most notable and lifelong friend Isabelle McClung. “Isabelle inspired, encouraged and …show more content…
In 1913, she published her second novel O Pioneers!, which she claimed to be her true first novel “since it offers her true material” (Thacker). “In this book, she turned to her memories of the Nebraska prairie and wrote powerfully of immigrant efforts to come to terms with the land” (Arnold). O Pioneers! earned critical acclaimed, and Cather continued her work of fiction as her career expanded. In 1915, she published The Song of the Lark, featuring another woman protagonist and Cather’s interest in the music and the Southwest. At this point, she “was about forty years of age was ready to do what was needed to succeed by writing unique fiction” (Thacker). In 1916, her lifelong friend McClung married a violinist and moved to Europe, causing her emotional distress (Martin). Cather most likely reflected her distress in the next novel she wrote, My Ántonia. The book features an immigrant girl from Virginia to the Nebraska plains, inspired from people and events from her youth. Published in 1918, My Ántonia has become a modern classic and is recognized as one of her major …show more content…
Starting in 1920 came another short stories collection named Youth and the Bright Medusa written by Cather, containing four revised stories from The Troll Garden and new ones dealing with singers. In 1922, Cather published another novel called One of Ours, inspired by the death of her young cousin in France in 1918. The watershed novel was set against World War I and received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Beginning in 1923, Cather was in her period of great productivity. She published A Lost Lady, which critics called a minor masterpiece, was based on a woman that Cather greatly admired. In 1925, her next novel was The Professor’s House, a book about a history professor questioning the meaning of life after winning a literary prize. Follow up was My Mortal Enemy in 1926, the story of Myra Driscoll who lost her inheritance by marrying someone she love and regretted it afterward. In 1927, Cather and Lewis was forced to move out of their apartment because the building was set to be destroy. They rented a room nearby Grosvenor Hotel and lived there for almost five years. In the same year, Cather published Death Comes for the Archbishop, which she herself along with many critics considered to be her best novel. It is said that this book is: an experimental modernist work, loosely episodic, with no conventional plot and laced with inset stories. Cather said
Willa Cather writes the story of The Joy of Nelly Deane, describing Nelly’s joy as “unquenchable,” especially, Nelly’s joy attracted all the Baptist ladies who admired the prettiest girl in Riverbend, Nebraska (Cather, p. 225). Nelly fluttered from one social event to another, parties, picnics and dances, and sings like a “prima-donna” in the Baptist Church choir, where she met Peggy, the narrator of the story.
Different components of Willa Cather’s life influenced her novel Lucy Gayheart immensely. Living in the region and the time era that she did, her writing is considered to be local color literature. Many of the events took place in her home state, and Cather also spoke of many different places within the country. This influences the main character because when traveling between two diverse areas, Lucy’s lifestyle and mindset changes stereotypically. Also, there were people in Cather’s life that influenced characters in Lucy Gayheart and that shared many similarities with each other. Her location and her acquaintances have a very parallel structure to the theme and characters in Lucy Gayheart.
...is book expresses her ever-changing life and tough it was on the women of this time period.
In the year 1890 Willa Cather moved to Lincoln Nebraska to attend the university and study medicine and science to become a physician....
In Cather’s novel, she depicts the “nostalgia disease” and “feeling of nostalgia” by representing different characters’ life experience
A man who is a great writer may only be known to some people as a man who has a creative mind and a skilled hand. People rarely see the true life of their favorite author. Plunging into the lives of other people can open a new perspective for an aspiring young writer. Tennessee William’s writing and lifestyle influenced a new age for American literature.
The mere name Faulkner often strikes fear into the hearts of readers of American literature. His constant variation in his prose style and sentences has baffled minds for nearly eight decades. Long sentences, which sometimes run for pages without punctuation of any sort, are his trademarks; he tried to express each idea to the fullest in his sentences. Oftentimes, the sheer difficulty encountered when reading his literature has turned many a reader away. Somehow, despite this, William Faulkner has been recognized as one of the greatest American writers of the Twentieth Century. He won the Pulitzer Prize for two of his novels, A Fable (1924), and The Reivers (1962), and he also received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949. So why is his writing considered to be so good if so many people can't stand to read it? The answer lies in the thought behind and the background of his literature. Faulkner's writing strikes a chord in readers because of his attention to detail; his novels are not merely stories, but instead they are volumes of art.
American author Kate Chopin wrote two published novels and about a hundred short stories in the 1890s Most of her fiction is set in Louisiana and most of her best-known work focuses on the lives of sensitive, intelligent women. Her short stories were well received in her own time and were published by some of America’s most prestigious magazines—Vogue, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Young People, and Century. Her early novel At Fault (1890) had not been much noticed by the public, but The Awakening (1899) was widely condemned. Critics called it morbid, vulgar, and disagreeable (Kate Chopin Biography).
She visited Kentucky, saw the life of slavery, she is affected by strong anti slavery sentiment father school. This feeling into her novels tone. In 1850, with her husband moved to Maine, where the discussion of anti slavery made her very excited, so spare time to write the novel ...
Willa Cather’s novel, My Antonia, was first published in 1918 and was translated the following year to Swedish. Since then, it has been translated 83 times. My Antonia is widely known as a classic novel about the American immigrant experience. It is a story about a Bohemian immigrant who, along with her family, moves to America to pursue a better life. Antonia and her family leave behind their home—a place that gave them a sense of comfort—to a Nebraskan prairie that is unknown to them. Her family sacrificed everything for a better future in a country that was foreign to them. As a family, they faced a great deal of challenges, but Willa Cather demonstrates the characters’ courage and strength through the eyes of Antonia’s childhood friend, Jim Burden. Throughout the novel, we get to see that Antonia, and all the other characters who are faced with challenges, are able to make of the best of their situation. Willa Cather writes in such a unique way; it
Some of the characteristics of Modernism are: a desire to break conventions and established traditions, reject history, experiment, remove relativity, remove any literal meaning, and create an identity that is fluid. The rejection of history sought to provide a narrative that could be completely up for interpretation. Any literal meaning no longer existed nor was it easily given; essence became synonymous. Narrative was transformed. Epic stories, like “Hills Like White Elephants”, could occur in the sequence of a day. Stories became pushed by a flow of thoughts. The narrative became skeptical of linear plots, preferring to function in fragments. These fragments often led to open unresolved inconclusive endings. This echoes in the short story’s format. The short story functions in fragmented dialogue. Focusing on subjectivity rather than objectivity. Creating characters with unfixed, mixed views to challenge readers.
Millington, Richard H. "Willa Cather’s American modernism." The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather. Ed. Marilee Lindemann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Grantland S. Rice, author of The Transformation of Authorship in America, contends that the ultimate composition of American literature is fundamentally based upon a combination of efforts involving gender, class, period and application. What is particualy, interesting about Rice’s observations is the manner in which he applies his theories to literary considerations. According to Rice, there were a great many influences that constructed American literature up through modern times; as much as writers were “increasingly forced by social, political and economic changes” (Rice 159), it was because of these modifications that the literary experience gained in substance. In their attempts to uphold civic virtue, early writers “no doubt turned to the audience through whom they
What inspires her to write the story? As I read her biography I concluded that her personal life and experiences. she mentions that she started to write after her husband’s death. Which indicates that she was not allowed to write before and when in the story her husband
Davidson, Cathy N. "Sentimental Novel." The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. Eds. Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin. NY: Oxford UP, 1985.