Willa Cather

Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose fiction of the Great Plains and the immigrant settlers who farmed it placed her at the center of early-twentieth-century American letters. She received the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1923 for One of Ours.

Born near Winchester, Virginia, she moved with her family at the age of nine to Webster County, Nebraska, where the prairie landscape and the Bohemian, Scandinavian, and German neighbors of her childhood would shape much of her later fiction. She earned a degree from the University of Nebraska in 1895, then worked as a journalist and high-school teacher in Pittsburgh before joining McClure's Magazine in New York in 1906, where she rose to managing editor.

Her first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912), drew on Henry James; with O Pioneers! (1913) and The Song of the Lark (1915) she found her own subject in the rural Midwest. My Ántonia (1918) is widely regarded as her finest novel, told through the recollections of a Bohemian immigrant farm girl named Ántonia Shimerda.

The Pulitzer-winning One of Ours (1922) drew on the death of her cousin in World War I. Later works moved across geography and time, including A Lost Lady (1923), the New Mexico novel Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) about Archbishop Lamy, and the Quebec-set Shadows on the Rock (1931). She lived in Greenwich Village with her partner Edith Lewis for nearly forty years and died in New York in 1947.

The name Willa is a feminine form of William, from the Old Germanic Wilhelm meaning resolute protector. She made the name a fixture of American literary history.