Discussion Topics
Willa Cather frequently gave her characters suggestive names. Consider several characters whose names suggest their traits or circumstances.
Authors often combine some of the characteristics of two or more real person to fashion one fictional one. Consider Ántonia Shimerda as an instance of this practice.
What is Cather’s attitude toward social change as revealed in her novels? Nostalgic? Accepting? Resistant? Ambivalent? Does it vary from one work to another?
Discuss Cather’s work ethic as revealed in her life and in the characterization of the professor in The Professor’s House.
Describe some of the “unique secondary characters” in Death Comes to the Archbishop.
Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom published a book about Cather in 1962 titled Willa Cather’s Gift of Sympathy. What evidence of her sympathy do you find in a novel of your choice?
Other Literary Forms
Willa Cather is best known as a novelist, but she wrote prolifically in other forms, especially as a young woman; she had been publishing short stories for more than twenty years before she published her first novel. Although her fame rests largely on her twelve novels and a few short stories, she has a collection of poetry, several collections of essays, and hundreds of newspaper columns and magazine pieces to her credit. Only one of her books, A Lost Lady (1923), was filmed in Hollywood; after that one experience, Cather would not allow any of her work to be filmed again.
Achievements
Willa Cather was one of America’s first modern writers to make the prairie immigrant experience an important and continuing subject for high-quality fiction. Although her setting is often the American western frontier, she masterfully locates the universal through the specific, and her literary reputation transcends the limitations of regional or gender affiliation. In her exploration of the human spirit, Cather characteristically defends artistic values in an increasingly materialistic world, and she is known for her graceful rendering of place and character.
Praised in the 1920’s as one of the most successful novelists of her time, Cather was sometimes criticized in the next decade for neglecting contemporary social issues. Later, however, and especially since her death, she was recognized as a great artist and one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel One of Ours (1922). She also received the Howells Medal for fiction from the Academy of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1930, the Prix Fémina Américain for Shadows on the Rock (1931) in 1933, and the gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1944. With time, interest in Cather’s fiction continued to increase, rather than diminish, and she enjoys appreciative audiences abroad as well as in her own country.
Other literary forms
Willa Cather (KATH-ur) was a prolific writer, especially as a young woman. By the time her first novel was published when she was thirty-eight years old, she had written more than forty short stories, at least five hundred columns and reviews, numerous magazine articles and essays, and a volume of poetry. She collected three volumes of her short stores: The Troll Garden (1905), Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920), and Obscure Destinies (1932). Those volumes contain the few short stories she allowed to be anthologized, most frequently “Paul’s Case,” “The Sculptor’s Funeral” (The Troll Garden), and “Neighbour Rosicky” (Obscure Destinies). Cather continued to write short stories after she began writing novels, but she wrote them less frequently. After her death, additional volumes were published that contain other stories: The Old Beauty and Others (1948), Willa Cather’s Collected Short...
(This entire section contains 357 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
Fiction: 1892-1912 (1965), and Uncle Valentine, and Other Stories: Willa Cather’s Collected Short Fiction, 1915-1929 (1973).
A great many of Cather’s early newspaper columns and reviews have been collected in The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather’s First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893-1896 (1966) and in The World and the Parish: Willa Cather’s Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902 (1970). Three volumes of her essays, which include prefaces to the works of writers she admired, have also been published. Cather herself prepared the earliest volume, Not Under Forty (1936), for publication; the other two, Willa Cather on Writing (1949) and Willa Cather in Europe (1956), appeared after her death. Her single volume of poetry, April Twilights, appeared in 1903, but Cather later spoke apologetically of that effort, even jokingly telling a friend that she had tried to buy up and destroy all extant copies so that no one would see them.
Cather’s novel A Lost Lady has twice been adapted for the screen, in 1924 and 1934. The second screen version was so distasteful to her that in her will she prohibited any such attempts in the future. Nevertheless, several of her novels—O Pioneers! (1992), My Ántonia (1995), and The Song of the Lark (2001)—have been adapted for television, as have some of her short stories. Cather also included instructions in her will forbidding the publication of her letters.
Achievements
Willa Cather actually had at least two careers in her lifetime. Prior to becoming a novelist, she was a highly successful journalist and writer of short fiction as well as a high school English teacher. She began her career as a writer while still in college, where she published several short stories and wrote a regular newspaper column for the Nebraska State Journal. Later she also wrote for the Lincoln Courier. Her columns addressed a variety of subjects, but many of them were related to the arts. She discussed books and authors and reviewed the many plays, operas, and concerts that came through Lincoln on tour. She gained an early reputation as an astute (and opinionated) critic. Even after she moved to Pittsburgh, the Lincoln papers continued to print her columns.
Over the years, Cather published stories in such national magazines as Century, Collier’s, Harper’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, Woman’s Home Companion, Saturday Evening Post, and McClure’s, the popular journal for which she served as an editor for several years. During her affiliation with McClure’s, Cather traveled widely, gathering material for stories and making contacts with contributors to the magazine. She helped many a struggling young writer to find a market, and she worked regularly with already prominent writers. Cather had been a student of the classics since childhood, and she was unusually well read. She was also a devoted and knowledgeable student of art and music, a truly educated woman with highly developed, intelligent tastes. She was friendly with several celebrated musicians, including Metropolitan Opera soprano Olive Fremstad, on whom she patterned Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark; songwriter Ethelbert Nevin; and the famous child prodigies the Menuhins. She also knew author Sarah Orne Jewett briefly.
Typically, Cather did not move in writers’ circles but preferred to work by her own light and without the regular association of other writers of her time. She never sought the public eye, and as the years went on she chose to work in relative solitude, preferring the company of only close friends and family. Known primarily as a novelist, she also later enjoyed a growing reputation as a writer of short fiction. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, and an ardent admirer, Sinclair Lewis, was heard to remark that she was more deserving than he of the Nobel Prize he won. Cather is particularly appealing to readers who like wholesome, value-centered art. She is held in increasingly high regard among critics and scholars of twentieth century literature and is recognized as one of the finest stylists in American letters.
