Willa Cather
Cather signature by Willa Cather, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
About the Author
Willa Cather ca. 1912 wearing necklace from Sarah Orne Jewett taken by Aime Dupont Studio, New York, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Born: 1873, Gore, Virginia
Died: 1947, New York City, New York
Years Active: 1912-1947
Literary Movement: American Realism, Modernism
Cather and Queer Experience
Willa Cather in the Mesa Verde wilds by Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Willa Cather: Queering America (1999) by
Although it has been posthumously proven that Willa Cather had lesbian relationships, she did not openly celebrate lesbian desire, and is sometimes described as homophobic and mysogynistic. In this study of Cather's life and work, the author aims to show her sexual coming-of-age occurred at a time when a cultural transition was recasting love between women as sexual deviance rather than romantic friendship.
Call Number: PS3505.A87 Z724 1999ISBN: 0231113242
- Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the Historiography of Lesbian Sexuality Article by Professor Melissa J. Homestead, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
- O [Queer] Pioneers! Narrating Queer Lives in Virtual Museums This study examines the current approach of virtual museums in presenting the lives of queer subjects, especially when a subject’s queerness is either almost completely obscured or seriously misrepresented in favor of a less controversial, more readily marketable version. Examining the Willa Cather Foundation virtual museum, this study critiques the selective erasure of various facets of historic figures’ lives and explores alternative approaches to reconcile similar situations.
- Queer Orientation in 20th Century Literature English Doctoral Dissertation by Michael G. Parker specifically focusing in part on Cather's "Paul's Case."
- Homosexual Identities in Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" Cather's understanding of the tacit limits governing the representation of sexuality, and the way they were linked to genre, explains why she chose the mode of indirection in writing her 1905 story of a homosexual teenager, "Paul's Case." Recent developments in sexology enabled Cather to characterize Paul as a homosexual without naming his condition. Through background information and physical description, Cather's narrator discreetly invokes degeneracy theory to explain her protagonist, aligning him with the subjects of recent case studies. After experimenting with the persona of the "fairy," Paul uses stolen money to transform himself into a cultured, sophisticated "queer," but neither persona proves permanently satisfactory. Through its references to Paul's sexuality, the story analyzes one particular product of late-nineteenth-century consumer capitalism: the middle-class, urban gay man.
Online Resources
- ProQuest Literature Online | Willa Cather Biographical overview, complete bibliography, journal articles, audio & video recordings, and recommended Web sites
- Literature Resource Center Online | Willa Cather Includes entries from Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Authors, Authors Series, and Scribner Writers Series
- Literary Encyclopedia | Willa Cather Biographical information, short pieces of writing on the author, and links to other resources
- Willa Cather: A Longer Biographical Sketch From the University of Nebraska - Lincoln.
- The Willa Cather Foundation The Willa Cather Foundation—formerly the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial—is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization dedicated to advancing the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather and preserving the historical settings and archival material associated with her life and writings. Since its founding in 1955, the WCF has been headquartered in Red Cloud, Nebraska. The mission of the Willa Cather Foundation is to promote and encourage increased understanding and appreciation of the life, times, settings, and work of Willa Cather. This is accomplished through a variety of programs that encourage Cather studies and literary, historical, and cultural inquiry among a broad and varied audience.
- Willa Cather, Pioneer From the Paris Review.
- Willa Cather Obituary from the New York Times Originally published on April 25, 1947.
- New York Public Library | Where to Start With Willa Cather Helpful information on Cather's works and tips on getting started with her writing.
- PBS Documentary | Meet Willa Cather This video from the American Masters film Willa Cather: The Road Is All introduces students to the novelist and her work.
Books on Cather at Colby
Willa Cather and Material Culture (2005) by
A compilation of essays focusing on the significance of material culture to Cather's work and Cather scholarship. Willa Cather and Material Culture is a collection of 11 new essays that tap into a recent and resurgent interest among Cather scholars in addressing her work and her career through the lens of cultural studies. One of the volume's primary purposes is to demonstrate the extent to which Cather did participate in her culture and to correct the commonplace view of her as a literary connoisseur set apart from her times. The contributors explore both the objects among which Cather lived and the objects that appear in her writings, as well as the commercial constraints of the publishing industry in which her art was made and marketed. Essays address her relationship to quilts both personally and as symbols in her work; her contributions to domestic magazines such as Home Monthly and Woman's Home Companion; the problematic nature of Hollywood productions of her work; and her efforts and successes as a businesswoman. By establishing the centrality of material matters to her writing, these essays contribute to the reclaiming of Cather as a modernist and highlight the significance of material culture, in general, to the study of American literature.
Call Number: PS3505.A87 Z93525 2005ISBN: 0817314369
The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather (2005) by
The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather offers thirteen original essays by leading scholars of a major American modernist novelist. Willa Cather's luminous prose is 'easy' to read yet surprisingly difficult to understand. The essays collected here are theoretically informed but accessibly written and cover the full range of Cather's career, including most of her twelve novels and several of her short stories. The essays situate Cather's work in a broad range of critical, cultural, and literary contexts, and the introduction explores current trends in Cather scholarship as well as the author's place in contemporary culture. With a detailed chronology and a guide to further reading, the volume offers students and teachers a fresh and thorough sense of the author of My ntonia, The Professor's House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop.
Call Number: PS3505.A87 Z59155 2005ISBN: 052182110X
Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism (2000) by
Expanding on her absorbing and controversial 1995 New Yorker article, Joan Acocella examines the politics of Willa Cather criticism: how Cather's work has been seized upon and often distorted by critics on both the left and the right. Acocella argues that the central element of Cather's works was not a political agenda but rather a tragic vision of life. This beautifully written book makes a significant contribution to Cather studies and, at the same time, points out the follies of political criticism in the study of all literature.
Call Number: PS3505.A87 Z545 2000ISBN: 0803210469
Willa Cather : the writer and her world (2000) by
Previous biographies of Willa Cather have either recycled the traditional view of a writer detached from social issues whose work supported a wholesome view of a vanished America, or they have focused solely on revelations about her private life. Challenging these narrow interpretations, Janis P. Stout presents a Cather whose life and quietly modernist work fully reflected the artistic and cultural tensions of her day. A product of the South--she was born in Virginia--Cather went west with her family at an early age, a participant in the aspirations of Manifest Destiny. Known for her celebrations of immigrants on the prairie, she in fact shared many of the ethnic suspicions of her contemporaries. Loved by a popular audience for her pieties of family and religion, she was in her youth a freethinker who resisted traditional patterns for women's lives, cutting her hair like a boy's and dressing in men's clothing. Seen by critics since the 1930s as a practitioner of an escapist formalism, she was, in Stout's view, profoundly ambivalent about most of the important questions she faced. Cather structured her writing to control her uncertainty and project a serenity she did not in fact feel. Cather has at times been viewed as a writer preoccupied with the past whose literary project had little to do with the intellectual currents of her time. On the contrary, Stout argues, Cather was a full participant in the doubts and conflicts of twentieth-century modernity. Only in recoil from her distress at these conflicts did she turn to overt celebrations of the past and construct a retiring, crotchety persona. The Cather that emerges from Stout's treatment is a modernist conservative in the mold of T. S. Eliot, though more responsive to her time and simultaneously less assured in her pronouncements. Cather's sexuality, too, is more complicated in Stout's version than previous biographers have allowed. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World presents a woman and an artist who fully exemplifies the ambivalence, the foreboding, and above all the complexity that we associate with the twentieth-century mind.
Call Number: PS3505.A87 Z863 2000ISBN: 0813919967
More Info on Literary Realism & Modernism
- The Modernist Journals Project The Modernist Journals Project is a major resource for the study of modernism in the English-speaking world, with periodical literature as its central concern. Our primary mission is to produce digital editions of culturally significant magazines from around the early 20th century and make them freely available to the public on our website.
- Literature at the Turn of the Century Information on the literary period of 1890-1918.
- Periods of American Literature From Encyclopedia Britannica.
Important Works of Fiction
O Pioneers! (1913) by
Often overshadowed by MY ÁNTONIA, O PIONEERS! tells the story of an immigrant pioneer woman's quest to live an independent life on the Nebraskan plains at the turn of the twentieth century.
Call Number: PS3505.A87 A15 1937 v.1
My Ántonia (1918) by
Often considered Cather's masterpiece, MY ÁNTONIA tells the story of an orphaned immigrant boy and his free-spirited female best friend as they navigate pioneer life at the turn of the twentieth century.
Call Number: PS3505.A87 M97 1961
The Song of the Lark (1915) by
Cather's third novel tells the story of a young singer growing up and finding success amidst the changing midwestern landscape of the early 20th century.
Call Number: PS3505.A87 S6
Primary Sources
- The Willa Cather Archive The Willa Cather Archive is an ambitious endeavor to create a rich, useful, and widely accessible site for the study of Willa Cather's life and writings.
- Primary Sources | Willa Cather From the University of Nebraska | Lincoln
- Image Galleries | The Willa Cather Foundation Images and photo archives of Cather's life.
Historical Context
- Prairie Settlement | Library of Congress Photographs of Nebraska settlement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from the Library of Congress.
- The Making of America | Cornell University Libraries The Cornell University Library Making of America Collection is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.
- The History of Nebraska State Information and photographs regarding the settlement of Nebraska, Cather's home for many years and the setting for most of her important works.
- A Nation of Immigrants in Rural America Information on European immigration into the American west in the late 19th century.
- German Immigrants to the United States Comprehensive timeline and exploration of German immigration to the US.