Willa
Sibert Cather, Nebraska's most noted novelist, was born in 1873 in
Virginia. At the age of ten, she moved with her family to
Webster
County, Nebraska, and lived on a farm there for two years before
moving
into the town of Red Cloud. Many of Cather's acquaintances
and Red Cloud area scenes can be recognized in her writings.
Cather graduated from the University of Nebraska in l895.
While attending the university, she was a drama critic for the Lincoln
Journal.
She worked for Home
Monthly and the Daily Leader in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, and later taught English and Latin at Allegheny,
Pennsylvania. She moved to New York and became the leading
magazine editor of her day while serving as managing editor of McClure's
Magazine from 1906 to 1912. Cather continued her
education and received an doctorate of letters at the University
of Nebraska in 1917. She also received honorary degrees from
the University of Michigan, the University of California, and from
Columbia, Yale, and Princeton.
Cather wrote poetry, short stories, essays, and novels, winning
many
awards including the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts
and
Letters. In 1922 she won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, One
of Ours,
about a Nebraska farm boy who went off to World War I. Her
novel, A Lost Lady, was made into a silent movie in
1925. It premiered in Red Cloud, Nebraska and starred Irene
Rich. Another movie of A Lost Lady was made in 1934,
starring Barbara Stanwyck. Other well-known Cather novels
include My Antonia, O Pioneers, Death Comes for
the Archbishop, and The Professor's House.
Cather died April 24, 1947 in New York. In 1961 Cather was
the
first woman voted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame. She was
inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners in Oklahoma City,
Oklahoma in 1974 and into the National Women's Hall of Fame at
Seneca, New York in 1988.
The Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation at
Red
Cloud, Nebraska preserved her childhood home and other buildings
connected with her writings. In 1978 these properties were
given to the
State of Nebraska to be administered as the Willa Cather
Historical
Center by the Nebraska State Historical Society. The Nature
Conservancy purchased 210 acres of native grassland south of Red
Cloud in 1974, and the following year it was dedicated as the
Willa Cather Memorial Prairie.
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