Scandinavian and Bohemian farmers. Christened Willela, she liked to be called Bill or Billy, and eventually changed her name to Willa. She was a tomboy, the oldest child in a large family. Her first interests were in nature and science. She said she intended to be a doctor, and sometimes jokingly signed herself “William Cather, M.D.”

At the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, an influential teacher diverted her to literature. Thus she was introduced to Stevenson, Maupassant, Flaubert, Mérimée, and Henry James. When she proved to be a fluent, perceptive writer, she became the drama and literary critic for local papers. This led upon graduation in 1895 to a newspaper job in Pittsburgh and then to teaching English literature in high school there. During the decade of her life in the birth town of Robinson Jeffers and Gertrude Stein, she kept on writing.

Isabelle McClung, the beautiful, art-loving daughter of a wealthy family, persuaded her parents (against their will) to let Willa live with her in a studio apartment in their home. From this haven came Willa Cather's first books, one of poetry, April Twilights (1903), and one of stories, The Troll Garden (1905). She and Miss McClung travelled together in Europe.

Willa Cather never married, although she did not lack proposals. She dedicated herself to her art—and to two women, Isabelle McClung and Edith Lewis. With the latter, a friend from the Lincoln years, she came eventually to share a home until her death. Masculine traits were strong in her. She was short and stocky and given to plain dress. Her hair was the color of bronze, her eyes blue-grey.

From Pittsburgh her destiny led to New York. Publication of The Troll Garden brought her into the ken of S. S. McClure, the foremost magazine publisher of the time. When the great muckrakers, Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker, quarreled with McClure and quit his magazine in a body, the publisher began to recruit anew with the appointment of Miss Cather. Within three years she became the managing editor of McClure's.

She impressed those around her with her forceful ability. The young poet, Witter Bynner, joined the staff of McClure's, and years later in a review of three books about Willa Cather, he recalled an incident during their tenure on the magazine when a story in manuscript by Miss Cather, based on a friend's life, was judged by the editorial staff to be fraught with emotional peril for the friend if printed. She refused to withhold it. “I can hear her now, saying briefly, ‘My art is more important than my friend.’”

Her early stories of Pittsburgh and the East were influenced by Henry James and Edith Wharton. Prairie and Southwest lay below the horizon. The forces that brought them higher were set in motion by a meeting in 1908 when, on an assignment in Boston, Willa Cather became friends with Sarah Orne Jewett, dean of New England writers and author of The Country of the Pointed Firs. She was twenty-five years older than Miss Cather. Her pleasure in The Troll Garden was not heightened by the stories Willa Cather kept writing while managing McClure's.

Whereupon Miss Jewett wrote Miss Cather what was probably the most important letter the younger woman ever received. Its counsel turned her toward her ultimate fame.

If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago. … Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the human heart. … To work in silence and with all one's heart, that is the writer's lot: he is the only artist who must be solitary, and yet needs the widest outlook on the world.

It is one thing to receive advice, another to embrace it. Although Willa Cather doubtless already knew it for the truth, Miss Jewett's was the confirmation she needed. This became her credo, and by adhering to it for the remaining thirty-nine years of her life, Willa Cather achieved greatness as a writer.

The first step toward it was that maiden journey to the Southwest, to Arizona in the spring of 1912. Even before she went there, however, the Southwest had appeared in her work in a story called “The Enchanted Bluff,” published in Harper's Monthly in 1909. Unlike the conventional tales Miss Jewett had warned her against, it went back to her girlhood and the local legend that Coronado had come as far as the prairies near Red Cloud, Nebraska, in his search for the Seven Golden Cities of Cibola. The story she wrote was of some boys camping on a sandbar in the river who fall to talking of the Mesa Encantada in New Mexico.

I believe that the immediate inspiration of the story was the controversy that had raged in the magazines and newspapers over whether or not the Enchanted Mesa had been inhabited; and particularly an article in Century Magazine by Frederick Webb Hodge called “The Ascent of the Enchanted Mesa,” with “Notes on Old Mesa Life” by Fernand Lungren, illustrated from vivid photographs by A. C. Vroman.

Winslow, Arizona, in the spring of 1912 was a rough division point on the Santa Fe, between Gallup and Flagstaff. It served Willa Cather as point of departure, by horseback to the Painted Desert and by train to Flagstaff, perhaps “deadheading” with her brakeman brother; and from there north to the Grand Canyon and south to Walnut Canyon and its prehistoric cliff dwellings. Remembered landscapes, especially of old cottonwoods, and Navajo hogans along the Little Colorado in a sandstorm, were eventually to appear in the Archbishop.

This was the Southwest before its transformation by the automobile. By one of those strange coincidences, this same place and time—Winslow in 1912—was to serve as the setting for Oliver La Farge's Laughing Boy.

It was not landscape, archeology, or history, however, that most excited Willa Cather. It was a man—a young Mexican from Vera Cruz named Julio, a singer of songs to his own guitar accompaniment. Julio took her to the Painted Desert and to a baile in the barrio. He was probably the only man ever to infatuate this strong woman. She poured out her feeling in letters to a friend at McClure's, urging her also to come to the Southwest and find herself a Mexican sweetheart.

She finally broke away, albeit reluctantly, and returned East; and yet she never forgot him. Years later, when someone asked her how Mabel Dodge Luhan could have married an Indian, Willa Cather replied, “How could she help it?”

This Southwest entrada was the great watershed in her creative life. She never returned to McClure's. Henceforth she was a novelist. She settled in Pittsburgh with the McClungs, and there the emotion of parting with Julio and reunion with Isabelle produced a “sudden inner explosion and enlightenment.” From that exaltation came O Pioneers!, to be followed by two other prairie masterpieces. She declared rightly that she was the first, in the words of Virgil (Primus ego in patriam mecum … deducam Musas) to bring the Muse into her country.

She moved back to New York in 1915 to share an apartment in Greenwich Village with Edith Lewis. Music and opera became a strong interest, and she wrote The Song of the Lark, a conventional novel based on the career of Olive Fremstad, the Swedish Wagnerian soprano—and on herself and her struggle to achieve independence and maintain integrity as a writer. It is not one of her best books. There is too much detail. In a revision years later, she cut it by 10 percent. Our interest here is the way she used her Southwest experience, including Julio, who appears as an old Mexican troubadour on tour in the East.

Next Miss Cather agreed to take a writing assignment in Germany for S. S. McClure. She and Isabelle McClung planned to go together. Old Judge McClung, who held the purse strings, said no. And so instead Willa Cather took Edith Lewis and set off again for the Southwest on her first visit to the Mesa Verde which, thanks to President Theodore Roosevelt, had been made a national park in 1906. The two women went by narrow gauge railroad from Denver to Durango, and thence by team and wagon from Mancos onto the Mesa. There for a week they camped in the park and had the nearly exclusive attention of the ranger. They also met the brother of Richard Wetherill; the latter was one of the two cowboys who had discovered the great Cliff Palace in 1888. Ten years later this Mesa Verde adventure became “Tom Outland's Story,” an inset in her novel, The Professor's House.

From the Mesa Verde the two women traveled by wagon over rough roads to Taos and spent a month there in a primitive adobe hotel run by a Mexican woman. They rode horseback to nearby villages, including Arroyo Hondo. This material was to give Death Comes for the Archbishop its concrete Southwestern imagery.

Upon her return to the East, Willa Cather was shocked by the death of Judge McClung and the breakup of the old home in Pittsburgh where she had first found the creative vein. An even worse blow followed. Freed of fatherly domination and with money of her own, Isabelle married. Her husband was Jan Hambourg, a foreign violinist. Willa was shattered. Writing became impossible. Again she sought solace in the West, in Taos.

And again she found healing in her art. She began to write. Back in New York she created the novel which shares with the Archbishop highest rank in the Cather canon. In My Ántonia, she did not repeat her mistake in The Song of the Lark of overfurnishing the story. “How wonderful it would be if we could throw all the furniture out of the window; and along with it, all the meaningless reiterations concerning physical sensations, all the tiresome old patterns, and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre … for the play of emotions great and little.”

This is what she did in My Ántonia. All her gifts were fused in it: knowledge of the prairie, abiding love for its pioneer Bohemians, and mastery of her medium. She wrote prose it is true, but prose intensified by imagination to the level of incandescence. Though she may have been austere in person and mannish in dress, her writing was distinguished by feminine tenderness.

This was the highest point she had reached. At forty-five she was beginning to feel the ills of the body. World War I and Isabelle's defection left aching scars. Her stories and succeeding novels grew sombre. She sought writing havens at Jaffrey, a New Hampshire village, and on the island of Grand Manan in New Brunswick's Bay of Fundy. She traveled again in Europe. One of Ours, a war novel (and one of her weakest), won the Pulitzer Prize. Honors and royalties accrued. The Professor's House, with its interpolated Mesa Verde story, harked back to her university years. Two short novels, My Mortal Enemy and A Lost Lady, were studies in disillusionment.

The latter is the third of her prairie masterpieces. In it she gave a last look at the land and the railroading age that followed the pioneers. Although romantic sex is a thin and pale strand in her fabric, she could, when she chose to, quicken the reader's senses, the more so for what was merely implied. Such occurs when Mrs. Forrester and her lover emerge from a buffalo-robed rendezvous in the snowy cedar brake and the man returns to cut the boughs they had ostensibly gone for. One of the Blum boys had hidden by chance close to the sleigh and horses. This is what he saw:

He reached under the seat for a hatchet and went back to the ravine. Mrs. Forrester sat with her eyes closed, her cheek pillowed on her muff, a faint, soft smile on her lips. The air was still and blue; the Blum boy could almost hear her breathe. When the strokes of the hatchet rang out from the ravine, he could see her eyelids flutter … soft shivers went through her body.

As her fame grew, Willa Cather insisted on privacy. When writing a book, her door was locked, her telephone disconnected. She lived by Miss Jewett's injunction, presenting to the world a blank facade.

In 1920, irked by her Boston publisher's lack of flair in designing and promoting her books, she left Houghton Mifflin and sought out the rising young publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. He welcomed her, and until her death twenty-seven years later, hers were his distinguished Borzoi books. Last spring in Tucson while teaching at the University of Arizona, I persuaded Knopf to speak to my class on his life as a publisher. When I drew him out on Willa Cather, he recalled her interest in the details of her books and that it was she who wrote the blurb that appeared on the dust wrapper of Death Comes for the Archbishop. She was a lady of a very special kind, he said, now all but extinct. Loyalty was one of her great qualities; if she were on your side it was almost impossible for you to do anything that she regarded as wrong. And if she were not on your side, you simply couldn't do anything of which she approved.

Her experience with the motion pictures was similar to that of Harvey Fergusson's (also a longtime Knopf author). After an unsatisfactory adaptation of A Lost Lady, she refused to grant any more movie rights, even when the offers were high; and furthermore, her will forbade any movie, radio, and TV productions of her books. Only novels of action can be dramatized, she said; hers were chromatic books of feeling, mood and setting, and would be destroyed in the process. She also left the restriction that her letters were never to be published. They are finding their way into libraries—Yale, Newberry, Huntington, and Willa Cather Memorial Library in Red Cloud, Nebraska—where they may be read and paraphrased, but never copied nor quoted.

Although it seems most unlikely, it was D. H. Lawrence who was responsible for Willa Cather's return to the Southwest after an absence of nearly ten years, a return that resulted in her writing Death Comes for the Archbishop. Was it Knopf who brought them together? In 1924 when Lawrence and Frieda, en route back to their ranch from Europe, twice had tea with Miss Cather in her Greenwich Village apartment, they were Knopf authors. She promised to rejoin the Lawrences in New Mexico.

And so the following summer she returned to Taos and lived in the house that Mabel Dodge Luhan had built for the Lawrences. Tony Luhan drove her and Edith Lewis about the countryside, sitting in the driver's seat “in his silver bracelets and purple blanket, often singing softly to himself, while we sat behind,” Miss Lewis recalled in a memoir of her companion. They visited the Lawrences at their ranch on Lobo Mountain. That summer was a creative time for both Lawrence and Willa Cather, he completing The Plumed Serpent, she conceiving the Archbishop.

How did that conception come about? Preparation for it began with her knowledge of the French missionaries in the Southwest, gained from a priest on her first visit to the region, and then from reading and travel on her several returns. Finally, in that summer of 1925 while staying at La Fonda in Santa Fe where she could look out from her room on the noble statue of Archbishop Lamy, there occurred another of those “sudden inner explosions and enlightenments” that had yielded My Ántonia.

In seeking information about Lamy she had obtained an obscure book by a priest named William Howlett, privately printed in 1908 at Pueblo, Colorado. This was The Life of the Right Reverend Joseph P. Macheboeuf, who had been Lamy's vicar and lifelong friend. Enthralled by the book, she stayed up nearly all night reading the story of the old churchmen renamed in her story Latour and Vaillant. By morning, she had planned her book.

“From that time on,” Miss Lewis recalled in her memoir of Miss Cather, “it completely took possession of her, filled all her waking thoughts. She knew exactly what material she needed in order to write the story as she wanted to write it, and she seemed to draw it out of everything she encountered—from the people she talked with—old settlers, priests, taxi-drivers, Indian traders, trainmen; from old books she found in the various libraries in Santa Fe, and used to bring back to the hotel by the armful, and read in the evening; and from the country itself. We drove all over northern New Mexico, this time by automobile. She made notes occasionally about dates and facts she took from her reading; but I do not think she made any notes of things she herself encountered. She trusted to her memory to retain anything of real interest or importance.”

Paul Horgan, who has long been engaged upon a definitive life of Lamy, tells of coming inadvertently upon Miss Cather and Miss Lewis in lounging chairs on a La Fonda balcony, surrounded by books and papers, at work on the Archbishop. “… the nearer of the two ladies turned upon me a light blue regard of such annoyance and distaste at my intrusion that I was gone too quickly to take more than a sweeping impression of where I had been.” It was the only time he ever saw Willa Cather.

Writing the book, Miss Cather said, was

… like a happy vacation from life, a return to childhood, to early memories. As a writer I had the satisfaction of working in a special genre which I had long wished to try. As a human being, I had the pleasure of paying an old debt of gratitude to the valiant men whose life and work … gave me a feeling of close kinship with them.

She was wrong, however, when she declared that its writing took only a few months. Begun in New Mexico, it was continued that fall in New Hampshire and then in New York during the winter and spring. For purposes of her story she found it necessary to return the following summer to see for the first time the Mesa Encantada and Ácoma. She and Miss Lewis were detained for a week at Laguna Pueblo by cloudbursts which made the clay road south impassable.

Back at La Fonda, Miss Cather neared the end of her task. Before going into a hospital at St. Louis, Mary Austin offered Willa Cather the use of her empty home, La Casa Querida, as a quiet place to write. Miss Cather found it ideally suited to her needs. Later she inscribed a copy “For Mary Austin, in whose lovely study I wrote the last chapters of this book. She will be my sternest critic—and she has the right to be. I will always take a calling-down from my betters.”

The book was finished that fall during her only stay at the MacDowell Colony at Peterborough, New Hampshire. It had taken a full year and a half to write.

She knew that she had wrought a masterpiece. Upon delivering the manuscript to Knopf, she predicted that after he and she were dead, his son would be paying royalties to her niece. On this book alone she shrewdly asked, and was given, an extra one percent of royalty. Now, forty-five years after publication, Alfred Knopf is still paying royalties to her estate.

Although not a Catholic (she was converted in 1922 to the Episcopal faith) Miss Cather's book was ardently embraced by Catholics. Mary Austin was displeased that French rather than Spanish missionaries were portrayed. The author had failed to include an acknowledgement of her debt to Father Howlett's book which had been the skeleton for her work. When that aggrieved priest gently reminded her of the oversight, she contritely wrote a letter to the Commonweal, telling how she came to write the book and crediting Father Howlett for all she owed him. Her title came from one of the pictures in Hans Holbein's famous sequence, “The Dance of Death.”

In form and content, Death Comes for the Archbishop is like no other Southwest novel.

Miss Cather said in a letter:

I am amused that so many reviews of this book began with the statement, “This book is hard to classify.” Then why bother? Many more assert vehemently that it is not a novel. Myself, I prefer to call it a narrative.

It is a work wherein the creative imagination seizes certain facts about the people, the land and the life of the Southwest, and remoulds them in a new form on a higher level, and does this in language of crystalline simplicity. The frescoes of Puvis de Chavannes in the Pantheon in Paris inspired her to visualize the book as a tapestry peopled by a few contrasting characters. Her touch was delicate, strong and sure. The book's configuration is like a prismatic web.

Its appeal has always been wide. Once in the 1950s I sent President Robert Gordon Sproul an article on Southwestern literature which quoted J. Frank Dobie's tribute to Willa Cather. His reply came from a vacation cabin high in the Sierra Nevada. “I found what he had to say about Willa Cather especially interesting, having years ago enjoyed a similar experience. I was left somewhere in a hotel room with nothing else to read, and opened Death Comes for the Archbishop. I found this book full of spiritual vitamins and was refreshed by the beauty of its contents as well as its writing. And so Willa Cather was one of the first I recommended for an honorary degree when I came into the presidency.” She was awarded the LLD by the University of California on Charter Day, 1931.

Now twenty years had passed and I was rereading Death Comes for the Archbishop. Although I was not in New Mexico at the time, I knew that the land of Arizona had been in the diocese of the Archbishop and that it was there in Tucson that his Vicar had served before his final mission to Colorado. Savoring the book anew took me in memory to places I had once traced on the episcopal path—to the Little Colorado, Canyon de Chelly, Ácoma, Mesa Encantada, Laguna Pueblo, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Arroyo Hondo, up into Colorado to the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

Throughout this Virginian-turned-Nebraskan-into-Southwesterner's book, there is no false note, no wrong color. It is faithful to the land and the people. She brought to it a half century of living, loving, looking and learning, and its creation was the supreme point to which she attained as a writer. To many it is the benchmark by which Southwestern writing must be measured.

Willa Cather lived another twenty years and wrote several lesser books, notably Shadows on the Rock (1931), Lucy Gayheart (1935), and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). They were years of gradual descent.

A book is made with one's own flesh and blood. It is cremated youth.

As she burned herself away in her writing, she had less and less to give. She was ever generous with what she had. During the Depression she helped half a dozen families, including her brothers.

Life closed in on her. Her parents died, followed by Isabelle and her two dearest brothers, Douglass and Roscoe. After Isabelle's death, Jan Hambourg returned the letters Willa had written to his wife. Bundle after bundle they were burned in her Park Avenue apartment incinerator. One who knew her said that Willa Cather feared the betrayal in print of “the heat and the abundance that surged up in her.”

The second World War was a final blow. She stopped writing, leaving an unfinished story of the time of the Avignon papacy. This too was burned. Although never bedridden and lucid to the last, she knew that her end was near. On April 24, 1947 death came for Willa Cather.

She lies buried on a hillside in Jaffrey. Her gravestone bears these words from My Ántonia:

That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.