Willa Cather

Who Was Willa Cather?

Willa Cather was one of the finest American novelists of the twentieth century and the supreme literary interpreter of the Great Plains — a writer whose fiction rendered the landscape, the immigrant communities, and the spiritual dimensions of the Nebraska frontier with a precision and a beauty that no subsequent writer has matched. Born in Virginia in 1873, she moved with her family to Nebraska at nine, and the shock of that landscape — vast, treeless, indifferent, and somehow alive with meaning — became the source of her greatest fiction.

Her major novels — O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), My Ántonia (1918), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) — constitute one of the most coherent and most beautiful bodies of fiction in American literature. Death Comes for the Archbishop, her account of the missionary work of Archbishop Lamy in the American Southwest, is the most explicitly theological of her novels and one of the most deeply spiritual American novels of the twentieth century.

Cather is significant for TLA because her fiction consistently renders the landscape as sacred — as a place where the transcendent presses against the ordinary with an insistence that secular culture cannot suppress. Her archbishop moves through the New Mexico desert and finds in its ancient stone and light something that his European formation has not prepared him for but that his faith recognizes.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• O Pioneers! — 1913
• The Song of the Lark — 1915
• My Ántonia — 1918
• A Lost Lady — 1923
• The Professor's House — 1925
• Death Comes for the Archbishop — 1927
• Shadows on the Rock — 1931