Willa Cather

Willa Cather was born in 1873 near Winchester, Virginia. When she was nine, her family moved to Nebraska, and the prairie she met there became the ground of her best-known fiction. She graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1895, later settled in New York, and died there in 1947.

Her subject was settlers and frontier life, and she treated them as people with inner lives. O Pioneers! (1913) and The Song of the Lark are set in the Great Plains. A Lost Lady and Alexander's Bridge are also among her main novels. My Ántonia (1918) is often called her finest work. Her prose is plain and carefully weighed, and she gives landscape as much weight as plot.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel One of Ours, which was published in 1922. She also received a gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Her Nebraska ties are still kept alive by the Willa Cather Foundation in Red Cloud and by the scholarly Willa Cather Archive at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) is the book to read first if it is the one that brought you here. It moves away from Nebraska to mid-nineteenth-century New Mexico. There it follows Jean Marie Latour, a French priest sent to a new diocese, and his friend Father Vaillant. The two characters are based on the real figures Archbishop Lamy and Father Joseph Machebeuf. The pace is unhurried, and the desert is a presence in the story. If you want her prairie side after that, try My Ántonia.