Willa Cather (Identities and Issues in Literature)

Author Profile

The single greatest trauma and most powerful positive influence on Willa Cather and her writing was her uprooting, at nine, from the farmlands of Virginia to the barren and lonely plains of Nebraska. The unfriendly landscape horrified her until she discovered the plains’ underlying beauty—and then that landscape never left her. Her realization that such harshness could also yield splendor gave her a keen awareness of other dichotomies: of pain and pleasure, of love and hate, and of what one hopes to attain and what is actually attainable.

Her early...

[The entire page is 2091 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the: