Willa Cather
1873–1947 · United States
“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Willa Cather
Drew From(1)
who shaped Willa Cather
via The Georgics
- The book wears its model openly. Its epigraph is Virgil's Optima dies... prima fugit from the Georgics, and that line surfaces again inside the story when Jim, a Latin student, sits with the text and feels his own lost youth float up off the page.
- Jim's revelation over Virgil's deducam Musas — the poet's vow to bring poetry home to his small rural patria — is Cather's mission statement: to consecrate the immigrant prairie as worthy ground for serious literature.
- Cather builds her American pastoral on the Georgics' faith that the land and the people who work it are the proper matter of poetry.
Portraits
Aimé Dupont studio portrait, ca. 1912, wearing the necklace gifted by Sarah Orne Jewett — the iconic image of Cather at the turn of her novel-writing career.
Aimé Dupont Studio, 1912
1921 portrait from the year after her breakthrough — a widely reprinted likeness of Cather at the height of her early fame.
Rinehart-Marsden Studio, 1921
Cather at Mesa Verde during her 1915 Southwest trip — the on-location image tied to the desert settings of The Professor's House and The Song of the Lark.
1915
Seated in the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, 1920 — a relaxed travel portrait, distinct from the studio likenesses.
1920
Famous Quotes
There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
he idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.
ptima dies ... prima fugit
About Willa Cather
American novelist whose fiction made the immigrant farms and grasslands of the Great Plains a subject worthy of serious literature. Born in Virginia in 1873, Cather moved at age nine to frontier Nebraska and settled in the village of Red Cloud, whose Bohemian, Scandinavian, and German settlers became the lasting material of her work. She studied at the University of Nebraska, worked as a journalist and teacher, and rose to managing editor of McClure's Magazine in New York before the writer Sarah Orne Jewett urged her to abandon journalism and write her own country. The result was the Prairie Trilogy — O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918) — pastoral, elegiac novels that treat the land almost as a character. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours and produced one final masterpiece, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Cather wrote in a spare, luminous style that prized clarity over ornament, and she died in New York in 1947, having made the American West a permanent province of the canon.