Willa Cather (December 7, 1873 - April 24, 1947) U.S.A. Writer Willela Sibert Cather is born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia, when she was nine, moved with her family to Red Cloud, Nebraska, where she was reared among the immigrants who are the subjects of many of her novels. Her mother was a vain woman, mostly concerned with fashion and trying to turn Willa into "a lady", in spite of the fact that Willa defied the norms for girls and cut her hair short and wore trousers. As a student at the University of Nebraska, Cather posed for a time as her imaginary male twin, William. After graduation from the university of Nebraska (1895), where her study of Latin may have influenced her graceful Virgilian style, and a period of journalism and high-school teaching, she published a book of poems, April Twilight, and a book of short stories The Troll Garden. In 1906 she moved to New York to join McClure's Magazine, initially as a member of the staff and ultimately as its managing editor. During this time she met Sara Orne Jewett, a woman from Maine who inspired her to later write about Nebraska. Cather wrote poetry, short stories, essays, and novels, and about Western pioneer life, for example Death Comes for the Archbishop set in New Mexico. She won many awards including the Gold Metal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel One of Ours, about a Nebraska farm boy who went off to World War I. Cather taught English from 1901 to 1906 in a Pittsburg high school, where she met and fell in love with 16-year-old Isabelle McClung. After a 12-year relationship McClung married, but she and Cather remained close for over 40 years. Although Cather's heart belonged to McClung, her closest relationship was with her lifetime companion, editor Edith Lewis. Cather and Lewis lived together in Greenwich Village for forty years, and arranged to be buried together when they died. By concealing her relationships with the women she loved, including Louise Pound, Isabella McClung (whose later marriage devstated Cather), and Edith Lewis, whith whom she established a domestic partnership that lasted 40 years, Cather also concealed the ways in which these women contributed to and nourished her creative abilities. Cather died in 1947 in New York in the apartment she shared with Edith Lewis, and is buried in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. At the time of her death, she ordered her letters burned. Willa Cather's childhood home can be visited at 245 Cedar Street in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Works: Peter (1892, short story published in a Boston magazine) Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920) April Twilight (1903, enlarged 1923) The Troll Garden (1905) Alexander's Bridge (1912) O Pioneers! (1913) The Song of the Lark (1915) My Antonia (1918) One of Ours (1922) A Lost Lady (1923) The Professor's House (1925) My Mortal Enemy (1926) Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) Shadows on the Rock (1931) Obscure Destiny (1932) Lucy Gayheart (1935) Not Under Forty (1936) Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) Old Beauty and Others (1948, post)

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