Willa Cather

Willa Cather was an American author famously known for her books of frontier life on the Great Plains including, My Antonia (1918), The Song of the Lark (1915), and O Pioneers (1913). One of Ours published in 1922 and set during the First World War won the Pulitzer Award in 1923.Cather was born in 1873 in the Back Creek Valley next to Winchester, Virginia and within a year after her birth, her family relocated to Willow Shadow, a home given to them by her grandparents. At the age of nine years, they again relocated to Nebraska to escape the outbreaks out tuberculosis that plagued Virginia. Cather’s earliest work was Red Cloud Chief, which was published in a local newspaper. Her time in the western state still on the frontier enriched her with formative experience. She was inspired by the dramatic experience, weather, Native American and immigrant families, various cultures of the European-American and the vastness of Nebraska prairie.