Willa Cather
Brilliant novelist.
'Stotted from the bottom... (Early life)
- Willa Cather was born in Virginia on December 7, 1873.
- She was given the birth name "Wiella" by her parents Charles Fectigue Cather, and Mary Virginia Boak.
- Her family moved to Nebraska when Willa was nine in pursuit of good farm land.
- Will described Nebraska as a "place where there was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the materials out of which countries were made...Between the earth and the sky I felt erased, blotted out".
Pictures of Nebraska:
...now we here. (Career)
- Cather moved to Pittsburgh in 1896 to write for Home Monthly, a women's magazine patterned after the successful Ladies' Home Journal. She later became a telegraph editor and drama critic for the Pittsburgh Leader and frequently contributed poetry and short fiction to The Library, another local publication.
- During her first year in Pittsburgh she wrote the short story "Tommy, the Unsentimental," about a Nebraskan girl with a boy's name, who looks like a boy and saves her father's bank business.
- The Troll Garden was her first set of short stories, published in 1905
- Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge, was published in 1912.
- Her Prairie Trilogy was praised by Sinclair Lewis because it made "the outside world know Nebraska as no one else has done."