As we have seen, Willa Cather was born to a stable, prosperous family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. As an adult she would shave three years off her age, claiming to have been born in 1876, and on at least one occasion claiming that her younger brothers Roscoe and Douglass were older than she, but her first biographer, E. K. Brown, located a letter from her father, Charles F. Cather, to his brother and sister-in-law, dated January 22, 1874, that indisputably establishes her birthdate.¹ This letter shows, too, that the family called her Willie from early infancy—a fact the importance of which will become evident later. For formal usage, the awkward middle syllable of her given name, Wilella, was soon dropped, and it became Willa.

Cather's father made his living by raising sheep. Cather herself would remember his gentleness and his care for his sheep dogs and how he sometimes made them little leather boots to protect their paws from the rocks of the hilly region in which they lived. Her mother, Mary Virginia Boak Cather, was a beautiful woman who seems to have been rather proud and to have expected others to cater to her. In 1873, not long before Willa's birth, Charles Cather's mother characterized her daughter-in-law as “easy insulted.” A long-time friend of Cather's and her companion for many years, Edith Lewis, stated that Mary Virginia Cather was “always the dominating figure in the family.”² Yet she also seems to have allowed her children considerable latitude to be themselves.

During Willa's early childhood the Cathers were the leading family in their immediate area, called Back Creek, and she lived an idyllic life, sheltered by green mountains all around and cared for by a large extended family. Her maternal grandmother, Rachel Boak, who had once helped a slave girl escape to freedom as Rachel Blake does in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, lived nearby. Neighboring families of humbler folk worked on the farm sporadically as paid helpers with the sheep or as household servants, or performed tasks for the family in their own homes, such as the braiding of rugs (mentioned in one of Cather's letters).³

In 1873 the region was still suffering the economic and political, as well as emotional, after-effects of the Civil War. Neighbor had been divided against neighbor and family member against family member as opinions conflicted about secession versus loyalty to the union. Such divisions ran through the Cather family itself and must have caused some tension between the Cathers and Grandma Boak, who had lost a son in the service of the Confederacy. Charles Cather, Willa's father, had spent the latter part of the war in West Virginia, safe from conscription into the southern army. After the war, he and his brother George came home, and were appointed as deputies when their father, William Cather, became sheriff. The community may have resented the family's alliance with the Reconstruction government and their comparative prosperity, while so many others were suffering privation. Whether by arson or by some less blamable cause, in 1882 the big sheep barn that stood behind and to one side of Willow Shade caught fire and was destroyed.

By that time, William Cather and his wife had already moved to Nebraska, along with their son George and his wife Frances (whom Cather always called Aunt Franc; George and Franc's son Grosvenor would be the model for Claude in Cather's novel One of Ours). Grandfather Cather still owned the sheep farm. Upon being consulted by mail, he decided against rebuilding the barn. Instead, he directed Charles to sell the property and join the rest of the family in Nebraska. Part of the reason seems to have been the elder Cather's gratification in the amount of land available for little investment and the promise of future prosperity he sensed in his chosen region, reinforced by a belief that the Midwestern climate would be healthier. In Virginia's dampness, the Cathers had lost several family members to tuberculosis. Whatever the reason, in April 1883 the family went by train to the Midwest, taking Grandmother Boak with them.

The move from Virginia to the relatively flat, bare plains of southern Nebraska was so traumatic to the young Willa Cather that it went far toward shaping her life and character. She remained intensely sensitive to landscape throughout her life. She later said that during her first few months on the plains, living on the ranch her grandfather had put together by combining homesteaded land with land purchased from the railroads,⁴ she felt such a sense of exposure that it seemed her very identity might be erased. She was intensely homesick. She may also have suffered some sort of paralytic illness, perhaps a mild case of poliomyelitis. Her mother, too, was ill for a while as a result of a miscarriage. But as time went by Cather began to enjoy the prairie and the varied customs and household practices of the people who lived there, many of them recent immigrants from northern Europe. She enjoyed riding her pony several miles to pick up mail that she distributed to neighboring families on a circuitous route home.

After only a few months, she came to love Nebraska. She would later say, in an interview in 1913, that she was “gripped” by the “shaggy grass country” with a “passion” that she was “never … able to shake.”⁵ But even though she became quite a traveler, her sense of displacement left her with an urge to find or return to a home. A tension between restlessness and a yearning for a secure home became one of her most striking lifelong traits and a recurrent theme in her fiction.

In September 1884 the Cathers moved into the town of Red Cloud, not such an out-of-the-way place then as it is now, since it had regular railroad service on the Burlington line. There Charles Cather operated an insurance and real estate business, and Willa and her brothers Douglass and Roscoe attended school. Previously they had been taught mainly at home, largely by Grandmother Boak. A short composition by the apparently very young Willa, entitled “Dogs,” which is found among her papers at Red Cloud, may have been written as an assignment while she was being home-schooled. It expresses an emphatically pro-dog, anti-cat sentiment.

Grandmother Boak continued to live with the family after they moved to town, although the house they rented (presently owned by the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial in Red Cloud and open to visitors) was a tight fit. The older children had their bedrooms in the attic, where a small private space was walled off for Willa. By working at a local drugstore, she earned money to purchase wallpaper, which she hung in her room herself, just as in The Song of the Lark. It is still there today.

Also still living with the family, and also having her bed in the attic, was Marjorie or Margie Anderson, the hired girl who had come with the Cathers from Virginia. Somewhat retarded and fearful of the outside world, Margie would work for the Cathers and live in their home until her death in 1928. Cather was very attached to Margie and depicted her in “Old Mrs. Harris” and One of Ours, as well as the poem “Poor Marty.”

In the public schools of Red Cloud Cather studied arithmetic and algebra, Latin, rhetoric (which probably meant in part spelling), sciences, and ancient history. A learned local store clerk from England read Latin and Greek with her and led her through some chemistry and biology experiments. Two local physicians sometimes took her along on house calls. As a result, she developed an ambition to be a doctor and began to call herself, for a while, Dr. William Cather. She also furthered her learning by her own extensive reading. A neighboring merchant and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wiener, gave her access to their multi-lingual library, and the Cathers themselves owned English classics. Cather earned cheap copies of George Eliot novels and translations of the Russian Leo Tolstoy by working in a drug store. Even before she went to college, then, she was remarkably well read by today's standards.

Another compensation for moving from the ranch into the more restrictive life of Red Cloud was the local theater. At that time it was quite common for towns of any size to have “opera houses” where touring performers put on plays, musical concerts, and lectures. Also, there were lively amateur theatricals. Cather herself performed as Hiawatha and as the father in a children's production of Beauty and the Beast, where she wore a top hat, suit, and false mustache. She would continue to take part in plays when she went to the University of Nebraska, sometimes taking male parts (not an uncommon practice at the time) and sometimes female parts.

The photographic record of Cather in late childhood and as a teenager, such as a picture made in her Beauty and the Beast costume and several pictures that show her with what appears to be a boy's haircut, combined with her temporary affectation of the name “William” and her lifelong use of “Willie” among close family friends, have led some biographers and critics to conclude that Cather was lesbian. It is entirely possible—even probable—that she was, at any rate in her strongest emotional attachments. But as we have seen, the use of “Willie” was not a conscious choice, but rather one begun in her infancy, following a common practice of southerners when pronouncing names ending in a. Even her use of “William” seems to have begun in childhood, rather than during an adolescent discovery of her sexuality, as scholars have sometimes suggested; the little composition on “Dogs” is signed William Cather. Her boyish or mannish looking clothes in adolescence have been called crossdressing, but they actually followed the styles being worn by the New Woman of the period (though of course their masculinized look may have appealed to her for other reasons as well).

In short, conclusions about Cather's sexuality are not so obvious as they may seem. It is wise to be cautious about making positive assertions. What is clear is that she was rebelling against conventional roles for women, as exemplified by her mother, who continued to be very much the southern lady, following prescribed patterns of decorum and decorativeness and fulfilling her wifely duties. Mary Virginia Cather ultimately bore four younger brothers and two younger sisters of Willa. The household was crowded with babies and their needs.

In 1890 Willa Cather went away to Lincoln to the Latin School, or preparatory school, of the University of Nebraska. Pupils from rural and small-town schools were routinely required to take two “prep” years. Because she was so advanced in many subjects, she was allowed to proceed to the University proper after only one year, and even during her “prep” year was allowed to take the college-level chemistry course and Shakespeare course. She had gone to the university intending to follow the science curriculum, but after a professor submitted one of her compositions (on Thomas Carlyle) to the Nebraska State Journal, a respected newspaper, and it was printed, she switched to the literature and classics curriculum. She was still very much the New Woman in her attire and her habits. She smoked cigarettes, spoke of her skill at mixing cocktails, and rode a “wheel” (bicycle).

During her years at the University of Nebraska Cather was active in journalism both on campus and off. Her first paid writing for the Nebraska State Journal was as a theater reviewer, a practice she would continue for several years after her graduation in 1895, and miscellaneous columnist. She also served as editor of the campus literary journal, the Hesperian, for one year, and with the encouragement of English professors she began to publish short stories in magazines. By the time she graduated, she already had considerable newspaper experience and was known among theatrical producers as a severe reviewer. Her editor on the Journal said she wielded a meat-ax.

For a year she cast about for jobs, at one point applying for a position as instructor at the University when her favorite English professor left. Showing the tendency to despondency that had already appeared in her reaction to the ending of a “crush” she had on a fellow (female) student, she complained that having to live back at home in Red Cloud was like being sentenced to Siberia. But in the summer of 1896, probably on the recommendation of the publisher or the managing editor of the Nebraska State Journal, she was offered the position of Editor of a new magazine being launched in Pittsburg, the Home Monthly. In a rush, she got prepared and left, traveling by train to what was then a very sooty industrial city and being taken in by the owner of the magazine, Mr. Axtell, to live with his family until she found her own rooms.

Cather's work for the Home Monthly lasted only a year, but during that time she gained valuable experience by performing the duties of editor, writer (usually under pseudonym), acquisitions editor, layout editor, and business manager. She also continued to write theater reviews, mainly for the Pittsburg Leader. This breadth of experience stood her in good stead when the magazine was sold and she elected to quit.

In September 1897 Cather returned to Pittsburgh (to use today's spelling) as an employee of the Leader. Her main assignment was the telegraph desk, where she received stories from abroad and wrote headlines for them, at a salary of ＄75 a month. In addition, she was paid by the column for reviews and miscellaneous columns, which she also supplied to the New York Sun and to two newspapers in Nebraska. In the spring of 1898 she was kept busy with telegrams pouring in providing news of the Spanish-American War.

For the next several years Cather made numerous shifts of jobs, writing columns for various publications and for a while working as a translator in Washington, D.C. She had an active social life, too, with a variety of friends. The most important of these was Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a locally prominent judge, with whom she shared a lively interest in the arts. Most of her recent biographers have believed that her relationship with Isabelle was lesbian. Whatever the truth of that belief, it is certain that the two remained devoted to each other until Isabelle's death in 1938, in Paris, from kidney disease.

In the spring of 1901, if not before, Cather moved into the McClung mansion. That same spring she accepted what was supposed to be a temporary job as a teacher of Latin and algebra at Central High School. She continued there the next fall as an English teacher, then moved to the more desirable Allegheny High School, where she advanced to the position of head of the department in 1903. She was remembered fondly by her students, who found her both demanding and unconventional. After school hours she wrote poetry and fiction. Although her productivity was slow, due to the demands of her teaching job, she did publish several stories in good magazines, a few poems, and a group of travel essays about her trip to Europe in 1902 with Isabelle. In 1903 she published her first book, April Twilights, a book of poems from a vanity press.

In 1905 Cather's first book of fiction, The Troll Garden, a collection of short stories, was published by McClure. The happiness of the event was marred for Cather, however, by an acrimonious debate with her friend Dorothy Canfield over a story called “The Profile.” Canfield said it should be deleted from the collection because it recognizably depicted a young woman with a disfiguring facial scar to whom Dorothy had introduced Cather and the young woman would be devastated if she saw herself depicted as she was in the story. Cather insisted that the resemblance was only incidental and that anyway the demands of art should take priority. The story was finally omitted and another (with a recognizable portrait of Dorothy's mother) substituted for it, but “The Profile” was later published in McClure's Magazine. We might wonder whether Canfield's friend wasn't more likely to see it in the magazine than in the book, since McClure's had a very wide circulation. This was not the only time Cather would provoke angry reactions by her fictionalized portraits of real people.

During these years Cather's interest in the theater remained strong. She had become acquainted with at least the careers of a number of important actors and actresses during her years as a reviewer, and personally acquainted with several. Performers became prominent among the characters in her short fiction as well as some of her novels. After 1901, when she became involved in teaching, she stopped writing reviews, but she would later, as a magazine journalist, write articles about the theater and performers, including singers as well as actors.

Cather once said that she had been desperate to get away from Nebraska to the East because she felt afraid that she would die in a corn field longing for good music and plays. From the time she left, however, she kept feeling drawn back to Nebraska and to home. Most years she made long visits to Red Cloud in the summer or at Christmas, spending time with her extended family as well as her parents and driving about the countryside in a buggy (or later, being driven by her father in his car) visiting the immigrant families she had known as a child. The hard lives of immigrants on Midwestern farms are central to her novels O Pioneers! and My Ántonia. Even after she moved to New York in 1906 to become an editor for the famous magazine publisher S. S. McClure, she continued to waver in her wishes, sometimes longing for Nebraska and then being cross and quarrelsome when she was there, sometimes claiming that she couldn't bear New York any longer but then always coming back to the city and its concerts and plays.

Cather's life had a pattern, in fact, of intense attachment to particular places. Not only Virginia and Nebraska and New York, as we have seen, but other places as well became important to her. In 1912 she went away for several months to the Southwest (Arizona and New Mexico) and fell in love with that landscape, too. For the next fifteen years she made many return visits to New Mexico, exploring the open country and the Spanish-speaking villages by horseback and going on excursions to Native American pueblos such as Hopi and Acoma. A sense of freedom and invigoration is associated with southwestern settings in her novels The Song of the Lark, The Professor's House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop.

In late 1917 Cather first went to yet another place that would be important in her life for many years, Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and a well-established resort hotel there, the Shattuck Inn. Isabelle McClung had married in 1916, after the deaths of both of her parents. Cather was at first devastated—perhaps as much because of the loss of access to the comfortable McClung home as because of Isabelle's new status as wife. Since 1912 she had shared an apartment on New York's Bank Street (in Greenwich Village) with another journalist, Edith Lewis, but had continued her close relationship with Isabelle and her practice of retreating to the McClung mansion to write, and she felt deserted when Isabelle chose to marry and move away. Also, she did not particularly like Isabelle's husband, the violinist Jan Hambourg, whom she considered a fortune-hunter. But in the summer of 1917, after receiving an honorary degree from the University of Nebraska and making extended visits to her parents in Red Cloud and her brother Roscoe in Wyoming, Cather joined the Hambourgs at Jaffrey for three weeks of writing.

In 1918 she went to Jaffrey again and read most of the proofs of My Ántonia there. She returned in August 1919, and thereafter spent the late summer and early fall in Jaffrey most years until the mid-1930s. She and Edith Lewis regularly occupied a pair of rooms on the top floor, where Cather could work in a quiet space high up under the eaves that reminded her of her girlhood attic room in Red Cloud. She also enjoyed strenuous hikes in the mountainous terrain and for many years carried along on her walks a field guide to wildflowers in which she marked the plants that she sighted. She was such a close observer that she sometimes added descriptive details to the book's write-ups.⁶

Yet another important place was added to Cather's restless life in 1920, when she and Edith Lewis made their first visit to the island of Grand Manan, off the coast of New Brunswick, Canada. After this they usually spent a quiet late-summer vacation in Grand Manan, followed by early fall in Jaffrey, before returning to New York for the rest of the fall and the winter. In New York Cather tried to spend her mornings writing, but often complained of the interruptions caused by the surging tides of people who lived in New York and either knew her or wanted to know her or those who came to town and wanted to visit. In the evenings she enjoyed dressing splendidly and going to concerts or the theater. By this time in her life, now a very successful and famous writer, Cather usually made her visits to Nebraska around Thanksgiving and Christmas. Combined with these trips were many voyages to Europe, sometimes involving stays of several months. She was almost constantly on the move.

Yet she also attached great importance to being at home, or to the wish to feel that she was at home. In 1926 she and Edith Lewis built a cottage on Grand Manan, near a cliff where she could take long walks looking down at the water and at pods of whales that she wrote about in her letters to friends. She was there in 1931 when her mother died, three years after Charles Cather's death. She had rushed back to Red Cloud from New York for the funeral of her beloved father, but from Grant Manan there were boats to the mainland only twice a week, and she would still be a cross-continent train ride away from California, where her mother had suffered a stroke in late 1928. It was impossible to get to the funeral, and Cather does not seem to have wished to do so. She was worn out from depression and her prolonged grieving for her father.

Cather stopped going to Grand Manan after 1940, when defense measures made the island uncomfortable.

Wars were a distressing presence in Cather's life. Her early childhood was significantly affected by the aftermath of the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War had occurred while she was a newspaperwoman, receiving and editing telegraph despatches. Probably the most significant war she experienced, in terms of her emotional reaction to it but also in terms of its vast historic after-effects, was World War One, which broke out in Europe in August 1914 and lasted until November 1918. (The United States entered the war in April 1917.) Having loved European culture all her life and having loved Europe itself, especially France, ever since her first trip there in 1902, Cather was acutely distressed by the war. Like many others of her time, she felt that human life was changed forever by the experience and the spectacle of the war—the misery of the trenches, which made ideas of glory outmoded; the new weaponry that turned combat into a slaughter and an exercise in futility; the disillusionment and cynicism that came in its wake. She was acutely distressed by the destruction to the villages and the landscape of France. She later said that the world “broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts” (preface to Not under Forty). The year she specified, 1922, seems a little odd if she was thinking specifically of the war, but if she meant the social changes that came in its wake, with the advent of the “roaring twenties,” it was a plausible choice.

Cather's choice of 1922 “or thereabouts” as the breakpoint in human history may have been influenced, too, by the fact that her “war novel,” One of Ours, was published in that year and had bad reviews, though also the Pulitzer Prize, “thereabouts.” The death of her cousin G. P. Cather, the son of her Uncle George and Aunt Franc, had caught her imagination in 1918 as she was completing My Ántonia, and she immediately determined to make Grosvenor and the events leading up to his death the center of her next novel. She initially called it simply “Claude,” using the main character's first name, until her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, insisted on a different title.

When World War II broke out, the second vast war of her lifetime besides other lesser wars, Cather was overcome by depression. She wailed that it was not fair for a single generation to have to endure two such terrible wars, and she sometimes spoke as if all of civilization (by which she meant European civilization) was doomed. By this time in her life, having spent many years of her earlier adulthood as a freethinker or religious skeptic, she had returned to the certitude of her religious upbringing, and in her letters she sometimes referred to Christianity as the only light in a dark world. It seemed to her a light in danger of being put out.

Cather had developed health problems in her later years, too, and these added to the depression that increasingly troubled her, especially after the deaths of her brother Douglass in 1938 and Isabelle McClung Hambourg that same year. Her prolonged depression even interfered with her closeness to her surviving friends. She seemed to fear that if she went back to Red Cloud to visit her closest friends of long ago, especially her friend Carrie Miner Sherwood, with whom she had kept up a long correspondence, she would be overcome by emotion and might dissolve into crying fits. Not wanting to let the people of her home town, most of whom she had come to believe were envious and hostile, see her in such a weakened state, she stayed away. Even the people she cared most about she kept at arms' length, interacting mainly by letter. Her brothers and sisters had to call the Knopf offices if they wanted to get in touch with her quickly. When she went out on the streets of New York, she preferred to walk closely behind Edith Lewis, to avoid being recognized by strangers. She had become a recluse and a curmudgeon. The darlings of her later years, child prodigy violinist Yehudi Menuhin and his family, were for the most part exceptions to this pattern, but toward the end she intimated that she found even their presence draining, to the point of leaving her debilitated for days after a visit.

Cather herself was in many ways a puzzle. The tension between her roving disposition and her craving for a familiar home and private retreat runs throughout her personal letters as well as her published writing. The tension between her idealistic values and her gloominess, or between her apparent certitude about morality and public issues and the ambivalence and ambiguity that lurk just under the surface of almost everything she wrote, is also a puzzle never resolved. Her sexuality—whether she was lesbian, or only homosocial in her emotional orientation, or as some scholars have believed simply sexless in her devotion to art—is endlessly debated. Even her views of, and feelings toward, gender politics are puzzling, considering her avowed dislike of assertive feminists, on one hand, and her various expressions of realization that women were not afforded equal opportunity in American society, on the other. Certainly her depiction of strong women characters shows a kind of feminism, even if it did not take the forms one usually expects. There is plenty of evidence that she was interested in politics, though she cultivated a demeanor of detachment, as if her eye were fixed exclusively on the timeless and the classic, outside politics altogether.

On April 24, 1947, Willa Cather suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died after only a few hours. She is buried in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. The grave of the devoted Edith Lewis is at her feet. Her tombstone reads, “That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great”—a line from My Ántonia.

Notes

1. Charles Cather to Mr. and Mrs. George P. Cather (in Webster County, Nebraska), from Back Creek Valley, Virginia, January 22, 1874, postmarked January 24, 1874; The Beinecke Library, Yale University, Za Cather (Brown), photostat copy.

2. Caroline Cather to Jennie Cather Ayre (in Upperville, Virginia), from Willow Shade, Back Creek, Virginia, April 17, 1873; Nebraska Historical Society, Lincoln, Nebraska. Lewis, p. 6.

3. This reference to Cather's mentioning of the braided rugs in one of her letters illustrates the value of doing archival research when studying a writer or other figure in depth. Archival research may mean the study of actual letters, diaries, financial records, or other original materials from the person's life, rather than simply relying on statements made in books or articles about the person.

4. To encourage development in the West, the United States government had granted vast tracts of land to the railroads, which they sold to settlers who then paid the railroads for shipping their crops. Vast fortunes were amassed by railroad industrialists in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

5. Bohlke, 1913 interview.

6. Cather's personal copy of F. Schuyler Mathews's Field Book of American Wild Flowers (1902), bearing annotations in her hand, is located at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin. When I examined it I found between two of the pages a tiny clover, still with its thread-like stem and pinhead-sized root ball attached—presumably placed there by the author herself.