Willa Sibert Cather was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I.
Cather was born Wilella Sibert Cather in 1873 on her maternal grandmother's farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia. Her father was Charles Fectigue Cather (d. 1928), whose family had lived on land in the valley for six generations. Cather's family originated in Wales, the family name deriving from Cadair Idris, a mountain range in northwestern Wales. Her mother was Mary Virginia Boak (died 1931), a former school teacher. Within a year of Cather's birth, the family moved to Willow Shade, a Greek Revival-style home on 130 acres given to them by her paternal grandparents.
When Willa was nine, her extended family migrated to the country-side north of the town of Red Cloud, Webster County Nebraska to an area called the "Divide". About a year and a half later, Charles moved his family into Red Cloud where Willa attended high school, graduating at 16 in a class of 3; shortly thereafter she began her 5 years at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. [1]
WILLA CATHER
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Willa Cather spent the last 39 years of her life with her domestic partner, Edith Lewis. Edith Lewis is buried beside Willa Cather in a Jaffrey, New Hampshire plot.
Edith Lewis shared a home with Willa Cather in New York City for almost 40 years. When Lewis acquired a summer cottage on the island of Grand Manan in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1926, the two shared a summer home there.
Lewis was Willa Cather's domestic partner and was named executor of Cather's literary estate in Cather's will. After Cather's death, Lewis published a memoir of Cather in 1953 titled Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record.
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