Author:
Won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922
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Date Posted: Friday, April 24, 2009, 01:19:21am
Willa Sibert Cather, noted American novelist, died at 4:30 P.M. yesterday in her home at 570 Park Avenue. After Miss Cather's death a secretary, who was with her at the time, was too upset to talk about it. It was reported that death was due to a cerebral hemorrhage. The author was 70 years old in December.
Surviving are two brothers, John E. Cather of Whittier, Calif., and James Cather of Long Beach, Calif., and two sisters, Mrs. Jessica Auld of Palo Alto, Calif., and Elsie Margaret Cather of Lincoln, Neb.
One of the most distinguished of American novelists, Willa Sibert Cather wrote a dozen or more novels that will be long remembered for their exquisite economy and charm of manner. Her talent had its nourishment and inspiration in the American scene, the Middle West in particular, and her sensitive and patient understanding of that section of the country formed the basis of her work.
Much of her writing was conceived in something of an attitude of placid reminiscence. This was notably true of such early novels as "My Antonia" and "O Pioneers!" in which she told with minute detail of homestead life on the slowly conquered prairies.
Perhaps her most famous book was "A Lost Lady," published in 1923. In it Miss Cather's talents were said to have reached their full maturity. It is the story of the Middle West in the age of railway-building, of the charming wife of Captain Forrester, a retired contractor, and her hospitable and open-handed household as seen through the eyes of an adoring boy. The climax of the book, with the disintegration of the Forrester household and the slow coarsening of his wife, is considered a masterpiece of vivid, haunting prose.
Won Pulitzer Prize in 1922
Another of her famous books is "Death Comes for the Archbishop," 1927, in which she tells in the form of a chronicle a simple story of two saints of the Southwest. Her novel, "One of Ours," won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922.
In 1944, Miss Cather received the gold medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the institute's highest award and designed not to honor a specific work, but the sustained output of a writer or artist.
Although generally thought of as a Western writer, Miss Cather was born on a farm near Winchester, Va., on Dec. 7, 1876. Her ancestors, on both sides, had been Virginia farmers for three or four generations. They came originally from England, Ireland and Alsace.
When she was 8 years old, her father took his family to Nebraska and bought a ranch near Red Cloud. The little girl did not go to school at first but spent many hours reading the English classics with her two grandmothers. Later, when her family moved into Red Cloud proper, she attended high school and then the University off Nebraska, from which she was graduated in 1895.
She spent a few years in Pittsburgh teaching and doing newspaper work, choosing that city rather than New York because she had many friends there. Each summer she visited in Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming. Meanwhile, she had started writing, and her first published book was a volume of verse. "April Twilights," reissued in 1923 as "April Twilights and Later Verse."
Editor on McClure's Magazine
Miss Cather's first volume of stories was "The Troll Garden," published in 1905 by McClure-Phillips. Two years later she became an associate editor in New York of McClure's Magazine. She then was managing editor of the publication for four years.
During this period she wrote very little but traveled a great deal in Europe and the American Southwest, Arizona and New Mexico. In 1912 she gave up editorial work to write her first novel, "Alexander's Bridge." This was followed by "O Pioneers!" "The Song of the Lark" and "My Antonia."
In "The Professor's House," 1925, she began experiments with a new technique of story- telling, constructing her tale of an intellectual's soul development according to the familiar methods of music.
The next year she wrote "My Mortal 'Enemy," which was compared by many with "A Lost Lady" but, for the most part, suffered by the comparison. A reviewer in The New York Times said of the book that while it was inferior to the former work it did impress as a "later" book.
In 1931 Miss Cather wrote "Shadows on the Rock," which was considered the most popular novel in America during that year in the annual Baker & Taylor survey, and won for her the Prix Femina Americaine.
Miss Cather, who in 1931 was ranked by J.B. Priestley, the English author, as this country's greatest novelist, received the honorary degree of Litt.D. in 1924 from the University of Michigan. Columbia University conferred the same distinction on her in 1928. Yale followed suit in 1929 and Princeton two years later.
Among her other novels were "Lucy Gayheart" and, her last, "Sapphira and the Slave Girl," published in 1940. She also wrote two books of short stories, "Obscure Destinies" and "Youth and the Bright Medusa," and a collection of essays under the title, "Not Under Forty." For many years her publishers have been Alfred A. Knopf.
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