Willa Cather was born in 1875 on a small farm nestled in the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, the eldest of seven children to Charles Cather, a deputy Sheriff and entrepreneur, and Mary Virginia Boak Cather. Her family's Irish ancestors had settled in Pennsylvania in the 1750s, and Willa's unconventional sense of style was evident from an early age, as she cut her hair short and wore trousers, much to the dismay of her fashionable mother.
In 1883, the Cather family relocated to Webster County, Nebraska, to join Willa's grandparents, and a year later, they moved to Red Cloud, a nearby railroad town, where Willa met Annie Sadilek, who would later serve as the inspiration for her novel My Antonia. Willa's academic pursuits took her to the University of Nebraska, where she edited the school magazine and contributed to local newspapers.
In 1892, Willa published her short story "Peter" in a Boston magazine, a work that would later become part of her novel My Antonia. After graduating in 1895, she became an editor at Home Monthly in Pittsburgh, and her short stories were eventually published in a collection called The Troll Garden in 1905, bringing her to the attention of S.S. McClure.
In 1906, Willa moved to New York to join McClure's Magazine, eventually rising to the position of managing editor. Over the next two decades, she published a plethora of works, including O Pioneers! (1913),My Antonia (1917),and One of Ours (1922),which won the Pulitzer Prize. Her early novels focused on the destruction of provincial life and the death of the pioneering tradition, while her later novels, such as The Professor's House (1925),My Mortal Enemy (1926),and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927),reflected the personal despair that followed her commercial success.
Willa once described herself as belonging to a world that had split into two, and as a woman of two centuries - the conservative 19th and the modern 20th - she bridged the large gap between traditional culture and the uneasy Americanism of new immigrants. Her writing often explored the most intimate pictures of the inner setting: the heart, the soul, the home. While there is speculation about her personal relationships with other women, her intimate connections with friends are evident in the intense human interactions and nature imagery found in her work.
Throughout her life, Willa maintained an active writing career, publishing novels and short stories until her death. She ordered her letters burned and was buried in New Hampshire, leaving behind a legacy of literary works that continue to captivate readers to this day.
