Willa Cather

Born on a small farm in Back Creek Valley (near Winchester, Virginia), her father was Charles Fectigue Cather, whose family had lived on land in the valley for six generations. Her mother was born Mary Virginia Boak, and she had six younger children: Roscoe, Douglass, Jessica, James, John, and Elsie. In 1884, Cather's family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska. There, she spent the rest of her childhood in the same town that has been made famous by her writing. She insisted on attending college, so her family borrowed money so she could enroll at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. While there, she became a regular contributor to the Nebraska State Journal.

In 1906 Cather moved to New York City in order to join the editorial staff of McClure's and later became the managing editor in 1908. As a journalist, she co-authored a powerful and highly critical biography of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. It was serialized in McClure's in 1907-8 and published as a book the next year. Christian Scientists were outraged and tried to buy every copy; it was reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press in 1993.

Miss Cather, while first traveling on horseback in New Mexico in 1912, and during later visits, was captivated by the story of the Roman Catholic prelate - Archbishop Jean Marie Latour in the novel, Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy who came from France and had to accommodate the religion of Rome to the different lifestyles and spiritual search of Spanish pioneers and Indians. His story became the unifying metaphor for her that portrayed the historic Southwest fictionally.

In 1925, while staying at La Fonda Hotel (it has not changed too much in appearance, especially in its old part) in the center of Santa Fe, Miss Cather turned her mind to the novel. The idea supposedly came to her in a rush one evening at the hotel, but it probably had deeper roots. She gathered reminiscences from Spanish settlers and handed-down Indian tales in the pueblos, researched the church biographies, and traveled through the countryside that had once been the Archbishop's domain.

''The longer I stayed in the Southwest,'' she wrote in a letter after the novel appeared, ''the more I felt that the story of the Catholic Church in that country was the most interesting of all its stories. The old mission churches, even those which were abandoned and in ruins, had a moving reality about them; the handcarved beams and joists, the utterly unconventional frescoes, the countless fanciful figures of the saints, no two of them alike, seemed a direct expression of some very real and lively human feeling.''

These sights and feelings are still there -in the novel and in fact. D.H. and Frieda Lawrence had persuaded Miss Cather to return to New Mexico after a 10 year absence. Alfred A. Knopf, Miss Cather's publisher, had brought the three together for tea one afternoon in New York. The Lawrences invited her to visit their ranch. In 1922, the British novelist himself had been lured to Taos, a village of artists and writers that is a short drive northeast of Santa Fe, by Mabel Dodge Luhan. The New York heiress had moved to the desert, established a literary salon there, and taken as her fourth husband an Indian. Miss Cather also lodged with the Luhans for a time.

She was celebrated by critics like H.L. Mencken for writing about ordinary people in plainspoken language. When he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Sinclair Lewis said Cather should have won it instead. However, later critics tended to favor more experimental authors and attacked Cather, a political conservative, for ignoring the actual plight of ordinary people.

In 1973, Willa Cather was honored by the United States Postal Service with her image on a postage stamp. Cather is a member of the Nebraska Hall of Fame. In 1986, she was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. She was a close companion to opera singer Olive Fremstad.