Willa cather brief biography
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Willa Cather
Longer Biographical Sketch
by Amy AhearnRemembered for her depictions of pioneer life in Nebraska, Willa Cather established a reputation for giving breath to the landscape of her fiction. Sensitive to the mannerisms and phrases of the people who inhabited her spaces, she brought American regions to life through her loving portrayals of individuals within local cultures. Cather believed that the artist's materials must come from impressions formed before adolescence. [1] Drawing from her childhood in Nebraska, Cather brought to national consciousness the beauty and vastness of the western plains. She was able to evoke this sense of place for other regions as well, including the Southwest, Virginia, France, and Quebec.
Born Wilella Cather on December 7, (she would later answer to "Willa"), she spent the first nine years of her life in Back Creek, Virginia, before moving with her family to Catherton, Nebraska in April of In the family resettled in Red Cloud, the town t
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Willa Cather
American writer (–)
Willa Sibert Cather (;[1] born Wilella Sibert Cather;[2] December 7, [A] – April 24, ) was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In , she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World WarI.
Willa Cather and her family moved from Virginia to Webster County, Nebraska, when she was nine years old. The family later settled in the town of Red Cloud. Shortly after graduating from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Cather moved to Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33, she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She spent the last 39 years of her life with her domest
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Willa Cather Biography
Willa Cather was born on December 7, , near Winchester, Va. She was the oldest of Charles and Mary Virginia’s seven children. Her father was a farmer and businessman; her mother a schoolteacher. In , the family moved to Nebraska to join her Cather grandparents and uncle. This uprooting left her deeply homesick for Virginia. She later described her first reaction to Nebraska’s stark landscape as “a kind of erasure of personality.”
After farming for over a year, Charles Cather resettled the family in nearby Red Cloud, Neb., where they lived in town and her father dealt in real estate and insurance. In Red Cloud, the inspiration for Black Hawk in My Ántonia, Cather established the relationships with friends and neighbors that would be the most important sources for her writing. She listened to the stories of her immigrant neighbors from Bohemia, Denmark, Norway and Sweden and their struggles to make a living from the land and find acceptance from their Amer