Why is willa cather important
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Willa Cather Biography
Willa Cather was born on December 7, 1873, 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 1883, 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 American-born neighbors.
During this time, Cather became friends with Annie Sadilek, the model
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Willa Cather
A Brief Biographical Sketch
by Amy AhearnBorn in Back Creek, Virginia on December 7, 1873, Willa Cather moved with her family to Catherton, Nebraska in 1883. The following year the family relocated to nearby Red Cloud, the same town that has been made famous by her writing. The nine-year-old had trouble adjusting to her new life on the prairie: the all-encompassing land surrounded her, making her feel an "erasure of personality." After a year, Cather had developed a fierce passion for the land, something that would remain at the core of her writing. By 1890, immigrants in Nebraska made up forty-three percent of the state population. Cather found herself surrounded by foreign languages and customs. Drawn together in their homesickness, Cather felt a certain kinship to the immigrant women of the Plains. [1] It was to this land and these people that her mind returned when she began writing novels.
Cather attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, graduating in 1895. While a student, she became a theater critic and columnist for the Nebraska State Journal and the
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Willa Cather
American writer (1873–1947)
Willa Sibert Cather (;[1] born Wilella Sibert Cather;[2] December 7, 1873[A] – April 24, 1947) 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 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.
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 domestic partner, Edith Lewis, before being diagnosed with breast cancer and dying
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