Willa Cather

Cather Novels & Stories 1905–1918

Willa Cather was born in 1873 and grew up in Red Cloud, Nebraska, a place that would serve as background for many of her works. In her teens, she determined that she would become a surgeon, then considered an impossible profession for women. Accordingly, she did her best to take on a male identity: chopped off her hair, signed herself “William,” dressed in men’s clothing, learned Latin, dissected animals, and got a job delivering mail on horseback—behavior that scandalized the town.

From Cather Novels & Stories 1905–1918:

“…Mrs. Kronborg was sitting up in bed darning stockings…She was a woman whom Dr. Archie respected; active, practical, unruffled; good-humored, but determined. Exactly the sort of woman to take care of a flighty preacher.”

In college, she began to write, and after college she moved to Pittsburgh and wrote for a newspaper. In 1906, Cather moved to New York, working for McClure’s, a prominent muckraking literary magazine. She was conservative in her politics, but unafraid to be outrageous in her appearance and her way of life. Another journalist, Edith Lewis, became her lifelong companion—first in an apartment in Greenwich Village and then in a summer house on a secluded island off the Canadian coast. Cather never used overtly gay themes in her books, and she burned her personal papers and letters, but she often wrote about female characters from a male point of view. It’s assumed she was a lesbian.

Beginning with O Pioneers! many of her books included fictionalized versions of people she once knew. It was Cather’s gift to transform the stories of her childhood into art, both universal and particular, that immortalizes the landscape, history, and immigrant experience of America.

ALSO RECOMMENDED:

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather. In her will, Cather instructed that her private letters should never be published, but the foundations that now own them decided to share them with the public (thankfully).

Peter’s Whiskey Cocktail

In her poignant short story, “Peter,” included in Friends of Childhood (and originally published in 1892 in The Mahogany Tree, a weekly literary magazine), Cather wrote that Peter would pawn his hat or coat to buy whiskey.

1½ oz. bourbon, rye, or blended whiskey

Club soda

Ginger ale

Fill a highball glass with ice and add bourbon. Fill with equal parts club soda and ginger ale. Serves 1.