Biography: Willa Cather
...hen took a job teaching High School English. During her teaching career, Cather did not give up her creative desires and published her first literary work, April Twilights, in 1903. She also published a book of poetry and a collection of short stories, The Troll Garden, in 1905. In 1906 Cather moved to New York to begin working as the editor of the famous McClure’s magazine. In 1908, while working for McClure’s magazine she met the New England regional writer, Sarah Orne Jewette, who would become her close friend, if even for a short time. Sarah died one year later. Sarah, as a fiction writer and lesbian, was probably a considerable influence on Cather’s style. Sarah once wrote to Cather, after expressing concern about Cather’s pace of development, “ ‘ You must find your own quiet center of life and write from that’ ”. In 1912, at the age of 40, Cather resigned from McClure’s and published her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge. In 1913 Cather published O Pioneers!, Followed by The Song of the Lark in 1915, then My Antonia in 1918. All three of these stories shared a common theme of heroic womanhood in the face of great hardship. These stories also signaled the beginning of her maturity and elevated her status as a writer on the American literary scene. Willa Cather never had any romantic interest in men. Her emotional life centered around women and, whether lesbian or not, her separation from the roles of sex in this time period, is an underlying theme in most of her writing, and is definitely portrayed in many of her main characters. Cather never married, but she developed many close friendships. Some of these dating back to her early years in Nebraska, lasted all her life. Cather lived with Edith Lewis, a fellow Nebraskan whom she had met in 1903, from 1908 until her death in 1947. Although troubled by bouts of poor health, writing remained Cather’s passion and she continued to publish. Hew writing concluded in 1940 with Saphira and the Slave Girl. This was the only novel set in Virginia. Living in a studio apartment in Greenwich Village, New York, Cather lived a relatively happy personal life, but became bothered with the world around her. Cather was considered to be a modernist and was troubled by the growing mechanization and mass-produced quality of the American society. At this time Cather’s writing changed direction and became concerned with finding “alternative values to materialistic life”, as she separated herself from the modern world. Two novels were produced during this writing stage, A Lost Lady, in 1923, and The Professor’s house, in 1925. Both of these novels deal with a spiritual and cultural crisis for the main characters. This crisis reflected Cat...