Biography of Willa Cather

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Biography of Willa Cather

Willa Cather was born December 7th, 1873 in the Back Creek Valley of Northern Neck, Virginia. Her parents, Charles Cather and Virginia Bloak, both came from families that had lived in the region for generations. Their house was described as “full of bustling and many-colored life” (E.K. Brown 18) including Willa’s three siblings, neighbors, and the friends of the family who came around often. The people of the town were eager to help one another out. Willa spent much of her time divided between her father, whom she helped in the fields tending to the sheep, and going with her grandmother and friend Margie Anderson “on errands of mercy and medicine, or [with] her mother on visits to cousins, neighbors or dependents” (21). At age nine, however, Charles Cather decided to move the family and join his father and brother near Red Cloud, Nebraska. The moves were difficult for Willa, but in later years she never regretted the change.

Red Cloud was a small, settled prairie town whose population was constantly growing from European immigration. The town was made up of primarily Scandinavian, Bohemian, and French immigrants who had come to work the land. The Cather family grew to include seven children while there, but Cather’s strongest influences came from older people in town: schoolteachers and neighbors who read with her and shared their libraries. Cather also met people like Annie Sadilek, a Bohemian woman credited with the inspiration for the character Antonia of Cather’s My Antonia. The entire town and atmosphere of Red Cloud served as the backdrop for most of Cather’s novels and short stories. She said herself that “the years from eight to fifteen are the formative period in ...

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... Her life’s contribution to society is remembered and praise. Cather was a modernist, but more than that, she was an amazing writer whose novels and writings are relevant and still touch readers today as they did when she had first written them.

Resource Page

Great Websites:

www.unl.edu/Cather : The Willa Cather Electronic Archive

http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap7/cather.html :

Perspectives in American Literature, a Research and Reference Guide

www.ibiblio.org

http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Authors/about_willa_cather.html

Bibliography

Brown, E.K. Willa Cather: A Critical Biography. Alfred A Knopf; New York: 1953.

Jessup, Josephine Lurie. The Faith of Our Fathers. Richard R. Smith; New York: 1950.

www.gustavus.edu, Scott Newstron, January 6, 2996, Harvard University, last updated March 5 2002.

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