Her other novels include The Song of the Lark(1915), The Professor’ s House (1925), My Mortal Enemy (1926), and Lucy Gayheart (1935). In 1922 she won the Pulitzer Prize for one of her lesser-known books, One of Ours.ĭeath Comes for the Archbishop (1927), her masterpiece, and Shadows on the Rock (1931) also celebrated the pioneer spirit, but in the Southwest and French Canada. But her place in American literature was established with her first Nebraska novel, O Pioneers!, published in 1913, which was followed by her most famous pioneer novel, My Antonia, in 1918. Her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, appeared in serial form in McClure’ s in 1912.

There she joined McClure’s magazine, a popular muckraking periodical that encouraged the writing of new young authors.Īfter meeting the author Sarah Orne Jewett, she decided to quit journalism and devote herself full time to fiction. By the time she went to the University of Nebraska in 1891–where she began by wearing boy’s clothes and cut her hair close to her head–she had decided to be a writer.Īfter graduation she worked for a Lincoln, Nebraska, newspaper, then moved to Pittsburgh and finally to New York City. The oldest of seven children, she was educated at home, studied Latin with a neighbor, and read the English classics in the evening. Because she is so famous for her Nebraska novels, many people assume she was born there, but Willa Cather was about nine years old when her family moved to a small Nebraska frontier town called Red Cloud that was populated by immigrant Swedes, Bohemians, Germans, Poles, Czechs, and Russians. Willa Cather was probably born in Virginia in 1873, although her parents did not register the date, and it is probably incorrectly given on her tombstone.

one's breath for a moment by a look or a gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things.' In the end, Antonia is exactly what Burden says she is: a woman who 'had that something which fires the imagination, could stop. Through the eyes of Jim Burden, her tutor and disappointed admirer, we follow Antonia from farm to town and through hardships both natural and human, surviving everything from poverty to a failed romance-and not only surviving, but triumphing. In this symphonically powerful novel, Willa Cather created one of the most winning heroines in American fiction, a woman whose robust high spirits and calm, undemonstrative strength are emblematic of the virtues Cather most admired in her country.Īntonia Shimerda is the daughter of Bohemian immigrants struggling with the oceanic loneliness of life on the Nebraska prairie.

My antonia first edition