Its the birthday of novelist Willa Cather born near Winchester, Virginia (1873). When she was nine years old, her family moved to the Nebraska plains. 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. Life on a farm didnt work out for the Cathers, so in less than two years they moved into the town of Red Cloud. It wasnt a big town, but there were lots of immigrants, and plenty of people traveled through because it was a railroad hub. In Red Cloud, the precocious young Cather soaked in the stories, language, music, and professions of the diverse people who lived in the town and surrounding countryside. When she was 11, she got a job delivering mail to the areas farms and got to know the immigrant farmers, something many of her non-immigrant neighbors refused to do, looking down on the immigrants accents and Old World ways. Cather didnt care much what her neighbors thought. She cut her hair short and went by Willie or William, dressed in boys clothing, and - most shocking of all - announced her intentions to become a physician. She was smart and very ambitious, and she was good at science, drama, writing, Latin - pretty much everything she tried. She was one of three students to graduate from her high school class (the other two were boys), and she enrolled in the University of Nebraska with every intention of becoming a doctor. During her first year there, one of her professors took an essay she wrote on Thomas Carlyle and, without her permission, submitted it to the Lincoln Journal. The paper published it. She said: That was the beginning of many troubles for me. Up to that point, I had planned to specialize in science; I thought I would like to study medicine. But what youthful vanity can be unaffected by the sight of itself in print! It had a kind of hypnotic effect. She decided to become a writer. Once she decided on her career, Cather wasted no time. Not only was she the managing editor of the newspaper and the literary editor of the yearbook, but she also began writing reviews and columns for the Nebraska State Journal and the Lincoln Courier. She earned enough to support herself during her last two years at university. The year she graduated, the 21-year-old Cather wrote in an essay for the Courier: When one comes to write [...] all that you have been taught leaves you, all that you have stolen lies discovered. [...] You have then to give voice to the hearts of men, and you can do it only so far as you have known them, loved them. It is a solemn and terrible thing to write a novel. I wish there was a tax levied on every novel published. We would have fewer ones and better. It was 17 years before Cather published her own first novel, Alexanders Bridge (1912). In the meantime, she moved to New York and had a successful career on the editorial staff of McClures magazine. In 1906, she wrote to her friend and mentor, the Maine writer Sarah Orne Jewett: Mr. McClure tells me that he does not think I will ever be able to do much at writing stories, that I am a good executive and I had better let it go at that. I sometimes, indeed I very often think that he is right. Jewett disagreed - she pushed Cather to keep writing, and to write from her own experience. After the publication of Alexanders Bridge, Cather quit her job and left New York. She wrote a second novel, this one completely for herself, drawing on the landscape and people of Nebraska. She said of writing her new novel, O Pioneers! (1913): This was like taking a ride through a familiar country on a horse that knew the way, on a fine morning when you felt like riding. [Alexanders Bridge] was like riding in a park, with someone not altogether congenial, to whom you had to be talking all the time. Her other novels include The Song of the Lark (1915), My Ántonia (1918), My Mortal Enemy (1926), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 12:32:31 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015