Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Willa Cather

The Writer's Almanac

It's the birthday of the novelist Willa Cather, (books by this author) born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia (1873). Her family moved west when she was a little girl, to get away from a tuberculosis epidemic that had killed all of her father's brothers. Congress had recently passed the Homestead Act, and thousands of people were moving west to take advantage of the free government land.

She always remembered the journey out to the plains, sitting on the hay in the bottom of a Studebaker wagon, holding on to the side to steady herself. She said, "As we drove further and further out into the country, I felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything—it was a kind of erasure of personality. I would not know how much a child's life is bound up in the woods and hills and meadows around it, if I had not been thrown out into a country as bare as a piece of sheet iron." Her family settled in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and she fell in love with the Nebraska landscape. She wrote, "Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth is the floor of the sky."

She went off to college, got involved in journalism and eventually moved to New York City to edit McClure's magazine. After living in New York for fifteen years, she quit her job and took a trip back home to Nebraska. Standing on the edge of a wheat field, she watched the first harvest that she had seen since her childhood. When she got back to the East, she began her first great novel, O Pioneers! (1913), about Alexandra Bergson, the oldest daughter of Swedish immigrant farmers, who struggles to work the family farm after her father dies. Cather went on to write many more novels about the westward expansion of the United States, including My Ántonia (1918), The Professor's House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).

Willa Cather said, "We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while."

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