Willa Cather

File:Willa Cather house from NE 3.JPG, Red Cloud, Nebraska]]

Cather was born in 1873 on her maternal grandmother's farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia.{{cite magazine |last1=Ross |first1=Alex |title=A Walk in Willa Cather's Prairie |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/02/a-walk-in-willa-cathers-prairie |magazine=The New Yorker |language=en-us}}{{cite web |last1=Ahearn |first1=Amy |title=Willa Cather: A Longer Biographical Sketch {{!}} Willa Cather Archive |url=https://cather.unl.edu/life/longbio |website=cather.unl.edu |publisher=University of Nebraska-Lincoln}} Her father, Charles Fectigue Cather,{{cite book |last1=Romines |first1=Ann |editor1-last=Romines |editor1-first=Ann |title=Willa Cather's southern connections : new essays on Cather and the South |date=2000 |publisher=University Press of Virginia |isbn=0813919606 |chapter=Introduction: Willa Cather's southern connections}} descended from a family that had originated in Wales,{{cite book |last1=Overton |first1=Grant |title=The women who make our novels |date=1928 |publisher=Dodd, Mead |page=77}} deriving the Cather surname from Cadair Idris, a Gwynedd mountain.{{r|bennet|page=3}} Her mother, Mary Virginia Boak, was a former school teacher.{{cite journal |last1=Hamner |first1=Eugenie Lambert |title=The unknown, well-known child in Cather's last novel |journal=Women's Studies |date=December 1984 |volume=11 |issue=3 |pages=347–358 |doi=10.1080/00497878.1984.9978621}} By the time Willa turned 12 months old, the family moved to Willow Shade, a Greek Revival-style home on 130 acres, given to them by her paternal grandparents.{{cite web |title=034-0162 Willow Shade |url=https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/034-0162/ |website=Virginia Department of Historic Resources}}

Mary Cather had six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass,{{efn-ua|According to Elsie, Douglass's real name was Douglas, but Willa wanted him to spell it as Douglass, so he spelled it that way to please her.{{cite journal |last1=Bennett |first1=Mildred R. |title=New Letters From Willa Cather |journal=Western American Literature |year=1988 |volume=23 |issue=3 |pages=223–227 |doi=10.1353/wal.1988.0160|s2cid=166167840 }}{{cite journal |last1=Bennett |first1=Mildred R. |title=What Happened to the Rest of the Charles Cather Family? |journal=Nebraska History |year=1973 |volume=54 |pages=619–624}}}} Jessica, James, John, and Elsie.{{r|Lewis|pages=5–7}} Willa was closer to her brothers than to her sisters, whom, according to biographer Hermione Lee, she "seems not to have liked very much."{{r|Lee1990|page=36}}

At the urging of Charles Cather's parents, the family moved to Nebraska in 1883 when Willa was nine years old. Farmland appealed to Charles's father, and the family also wished to escape the rampant tuberculosis outbreaks in Virginia.{{r|Lee1990|p=30}} Willa's father tried his hand at farming for 18 months, then moved the family into the town of Red Cloud, where he opened a real estate and insurance business, and the children attended school for the first time.{{r|Woodress|page=43}} Some of Cather's earliest work was first published in the Red Cloud Chief, the local paper.{{cite news |url=http://nebnewspapers.unl.edu/lccn/sn84022835/|title=About The Red Cloud Chief|last=Walter|first=Katherine|website=Nebraska Newspapers|publisher=University of Nebraska-Lincoln}} She also read widely, having made friends with a Jewish couple, the Wieners, who offered her unlimited access to their extensive library in Red Cloud.{{cite journal |last1=Bennett |first1=Mildred R. |title=The Childhood Worlds of Willa Cather |journal=Great Plains Quarterly |year=1982 |volume=2 |issue=4 |pages=204–209 |jstor=24467936 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/24467936 |issn=0275-7664}} At the same time, she made house calls with the local physician and decided to become a surgeon.{{cite journal |last1=Shaw |first1=Patrick W. |title=The Art of Conflict: Willa Cather's Last Three Novels |journal=South Central Review |year=1991 |volume=8 |issue=4 |pages=41–58 |doi=10.2307/3189622 |jstor=3189622 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3189622 |issn=0743-6831|url-access=subscription }}{{cite journal |last1=Forman |first1=Henry James |title=Willa Cather: A Voice from the Prairie |journal=Southwest Review |year=1962 |volume=47 |issue=3 |pages=248–258 |jstor=43471124 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/43471124 |issn=0038-4712}} For a short while, she signed her name as William,{{cite journal |last1=Schneiderman |first1=Leo |title=Willa Cather: Transitional Objects and Creativity |journal=Imagination, Cognition and Personality |date=1999–2000 |volume=19 |issue=2 |page=133|doi=10.2190/5EWU-VPYK-A6LK-J5KW |s2cid=144731651 }} but it was quickly abandoned in favor of "Willa."

After graduating from Red Cloud High School in 1890,{{cite web |title=Willa Cather's Biography |url=https://www.willacather.org/willa-cathers-biography |access-date=May 14, 2021 |website=Willa Cather Foundation}} at age 16, Cather moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, to enroll at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In her first year there, an essay she wrote on Thomas Carlyle was published in the Nebraska State Journal without her knowledge.{{cite journal |last1=Bullock |first1=Flora |title=Willa Cather Essayist and Dramatic Critic: 1891–1895 |journal=Prairie Schooner |year=1949 |volume=23 |issue=4 |pages=393–400 |jstor=40624175 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/40624175 |issn=0032-6682}}{{cite web |last1=Cather |first1=Willa |title=1927: LINCOLN {{!}} Willa Cather Archive |url=https://cather.unl.edu/writings/bohlke/letters/bohlke.l.05 |website=cather.unl.edu |access-date=January 15, 2021 |date=June 2, 1927}} Afterward, she began publishing columns for one dollar each, saying that her words on the printed page had "a kind of hypnotic effect" on her, pushing her to continue writing. She soon became a regular contributor to the Journal. Additionally, she served as the main editor of The Hesperian, the university's student newspaper, and became a contributor to the Lincoln Courier.{{cite web|url=http://nebnewspapers.unl.edu/nebraska_publishing/|title=Early Nebraska Journalist|last=Walter|first=Katherine|publisher=University of Nebraska-Lincoln|access-date=October 27, 2016}}

While at university, she learned mathematics from her friend John J. Pershing, who would later become General of the Armies and, like Cather, earn a Pulitzer Prize for writing.{{cite journal |last1=Homestead |first1=Melissa J. |title=Edith Lewis as Editor, Every Week Magazine, and the Contexts of Cather's Fiction |journal=Cather Studies |year=2010 |volume=8 |url=https://cather.unl.edu/scholarship/catherstudies/8/cs008.homestead}}{{cite speech|title=In Quest of General Pershing|first=Frank|last=Vandiver|event=Annual dinner of the Beta of Texas Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa|location=Cohen House, Rice University|date=May 2, 1962|url=https://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/62848/article_RIP482_part3.pdf}} Although she originally planned to study science with the goal of becoming a physician, she switched her course of study and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1895.{{r|Woodress|p=71}}

Cather's time in Nebraska, still considered a frontier state, was a formative experience: She was moved by the dramatic environment and weather, the vastness of the prairie, and the various cultures of the area's immigrant{{cite journal |last1=Laegreid |first1=Renee M. |title=The Good, The Bad, And The Ignored Immigrants In Willa Cather's O Pioneers! |journal=Great Plains Quarterly |date=Spring 2007 |volume=27 |issue=2 |pages=101–115 |url=https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/1478 |access-date=January 23, 2021}} and Native American families.{{cite journal |last1=Stouck |first1=David |title=Willa Cather and the Indian Heritage |journal=Twentieth Century Literature |year=1976 |volume=22 |issue=4 |pages=433–443 |doi=10.2307/440584 |jstor=440584 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/440584 |issn=0041-462X|url-access=subscription }}{{cite journal |last1=Reaver |first1=J. Russell |title=Mythic Motivation in Willa Cather's "O Pioneers!" |journal=Western Folklore |year=1968 |volume=27 |issue=1 |pages=19–25 |doi=10.2307/1498768 |jstor=1498768 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/1498768 |issn=0043-373X|url-access=subscription }}

In 1896, when Cather accepted a writing job with Home Monthly, a women's magazine, she moved to Pittsburgh.{{r|"pitt"}}{{Cite news |first=Patricia |last=Lowry |title=Places: In search of Willa Cather's East End haunts |url=http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08343/933170-42.stm |work=Pittsburgh Post-Gazette |date=December 8, 2008 | access-date =July 20, 2010}} There, she produced journalistic pieces, short stories, and poetry.{{cite journal |last1=Benson |first1=Peter |title=Willa Cather at Home Monthly |journal=Biography |year=1981 |volume=4 |issue=3 |pages=227–248 |doi=10.1353/bio.2010.0814|s2cid=162300709 }} When the magazine was sold a year later,{{cite news |last1=McBride |first1=Mary Ellen |title=Willa Cather's Prose Captured Pittsburgh |work=Pittsburgh Post-Gazette |date=July 18, 1973 |page=31}} she became a telegraph editor and critic for the Pittsburgh Leader and frequently contributed poetry and short fiction to The Library, another local publication.[http://www.clpgh.org/exhibit/neighborhoods/northside/nor_n111.html And Death Comes for Willa Cather, Famous Author] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151210185746/http://www.clpgh.org/exhibit/neighborhoods/northside/nor_n111.html |date=December 10, 2015 }}, Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, April 25, 1947 She also became a school teacher: She taught Latin, algebra, and English composition at Pittsburgh's Central High School for one year;{{cite book |last1=Duryea |first1=Polly P. |title=Paintings and Drawings in Willa Cather's Prose: A Catalogue Raisonné |date=1993 |publisher=University of Nebraska-Lincoln |page=13}} and then, taught English and Latin at the city's Allegheny High School, where she rose to head the English department.{{cite news |title=Author Snubs City's Mills, Praises Poet |work=The Pittsburgh Press |date=June 23, 1934 |page=44}}{{cite news |title=Willa Cather, Author, Dies |work=The Pittsburgh Press |date=April 25, 1947 |page=2}}

Shortly after moving to Pittsburgh, Cather began publishing short stories in the Home Monthly, including "Tommy, the Unsentimental"{{cite news |work=The Pittsburgh Press |date=July 26, 1896 |page=4 |title=Week's Outing to Cincinnati}} about a boyish-looking Nebraskan girl with a masculine name, who ultimately saves her father's banking business. Janis P. Stout in Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World (2000) cites this story among several Cather works that "demonstrate the speciousness of rigid gender roles, and give favorable treatment to characters who undermine conventions."{{cite book |last1=Stout |first1=Janis P. |title=Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World |year=2000 |publisher=University Press of Virginia |isbn=978-0-813-91996-6 |page=90}}

Cather resigned from her job at the Pittsburgh Leader in the late spring of 1900 before relocating to Washington, D.C., that fall.{{Cite web |title=Willa Cather: A Chronology of Her Life {{!}} Willa Cather Archive |url=https://cather.unl.edu/life/chronology |access-date=2024-10-17 |website=cather.unl.edu}} In April 1902, she published her final contribution to the Lincoln Courier before going abroad with Isabelle McClung that summer. Her first book, a collection of poetry called April Twilights, came out in 1903.{{efn-ua|This collection of poetry, while described as unremarkable,{{cite journal |last1=Ryder |first1=Mary R. |title=Prosodic Variations in Willa Gather's Prairie Poems |journal=Western American Literature |year=1985 |volume=20 |issue=3 |pages=223–237 |doi=10.1353/wal.1985.0028|s2cid=165164839 }} was republished several times by Cather over her life, although with significant alterations.{{cite journal |last1=Thacker |first1=Robert |title="As the Result of Many Solicitations": Ferris Greenslet, Houghton Mifflin, and Cather's Career |journal=Studies in the Novel |year=2013 |volume=45 |issue=3 |pages=369–386 |jstor=23594848 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23594848 |issn=0039-3827}} Eleven of these poems were never again published after 1903.{{cite journal |last1=Slote |first1=Bernice |title=Willa Cather and Her First Book |journal=Prairie Schooner |year=1981 |volume=55 |issue=1/2 |pages=109–113 |jstor=40630730 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/40630730 |issn=0032-6682}} This early experience with traditional, sentimental verse—without alteration from this scheme{{cite journal |last1=Woodress |first1=James |title=Whitman and Cather |journal=Études Anglaises |year=1992 |volume=45 |issue=3 |page=325 |language=en}}—was the basis for the rest of her literary career;{{cite journal |last1=Fullbrook |first1=Kate |last2=Ostwalt |first2=Conrad E. |title=Review of April Twilights; Willa Cather's Modernism: A Study of Style and Technique; After Eden: The Secularization of American Space in the Fiction of Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser, Conrad E. Ostwalt Jr.; Bergson and American Culture: The Worlds of Willa Cather and Wallace Stevens; Cather Studies |journal=Journal of American Studies |year=1992 |volume=26 |issue=1 |pages=120–122 |doi=10.1017/S0021875800030498 |jstor=27555618 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/27555618 |issn=0021-8758|url-access=subscription }} she remarked that one's earliest writing is formative.{{cite journal |last1=Van Gastel |first1=Ada L. |title=An Unpublished Poem by Willa Cather |journal=Resources for American Literary Study |year=1984 |volume=14 |issue=1/2 |pages=153–159 |doi=10.2307/26366417 |jstor=26366417 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/26366417 |issn=0048-7384|url-access=subscription }} While Cather's success was primarily in prose, her republishing of her earliest poetry suggests she wished to be taken as a poet as well.{{cite journal |last1=Stout |first1=Janis P. |title=Willa Cather's Poetry and the Object(s) of Art |journal=American Literary Realism |year=2003 |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=159–174 |jstor=27747093 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/27747093 |issn=1540-3084}} But this is contradicted by Cather's own words, where in 1925, where she wrote, "I do not take myself seriously as a poet."{{cite web |title=1925: LONDON {{!}} Willa Cather Archive |url=https://cather.unl.edu/writings/bohlke/letters/bohlke.l.04 |website=cather.unl.edu |access-date=February 5, 2021}}}} It was followed shortly afterward, in 1905, by Cather's first published collection of short stories, The Troll Garden, containing some of her most famous short fiction, including "A Wagner Matinee," "The Sculptor's Funeral," and "Paul's Case."{{cite journal |last1=Madigan |first1=Mark J. |title=Willa Cather and Dorothy Canfield Fisher |journal=Cather Studies |volume=1 |url=https://cather.unl.edu/scholarship/catherstudies/1/cs001.dorothy}}

Upon accepting an editorial position at McClure's Magazine in 1906, Cather moved to New York City.{{cite book |editor1-last=Browne |editor1-first=Anita |title=The one hundred best books by American women during the past hundred years, 1833–1933, as chosen for the National council of women |date=1933 |publisher=Associated authors service |page=53}} But, while still working at McClure's, she spent most of 1907 living in Boston, writing a series of exposés about the religious leader Mary Baker Eddy (although freelance journalist Georgine Milmine was solely credited as the author).Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather" by Benjamin Taylor, 2023. {{ISBN|978-0593-2988-24}}. See page 48. A 1993 letter, discovered in the Christian Science church archives by Eddy biographer Gillian Gill, disclosed that Cather had, perhaps reluctantly, written articles 2 through 14 of the 14-part series.Mary Baker Eddy by Gillian Gill, 1998, Perseus Books, 713 pages. {{ISBN|0-7382-0042-5}}. See pp 563-568 Milmine had performed copious research, but she had been unable to produce a manuscript independently, and McClure's employed Cather and a few other editors, including Burton J. Hendrick, to assist her.{{cite journal |last1=Squires |first1=Ashley |title=The Standard Oil Treatment: Willa Cather, "The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy", and Early Twentieth Century Collaborative Authorship |journal=Studies in the Novel |year=2013 |volume=45 |issue=3 |pages=328–348 |jstor=23594846 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23594846 |issn=0039-3827}} This work was serialized in McClure's over the next 18 months and then published in book form as The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science, attributed entirely to Georgina Milmine, instead of identifying Willa Cather as its rightful author (as was revealed and confirmed decades later).{{cite book |last1=Squires |first1=L. Ashley |title=Healing the Nation: Literature, Progress, and Christian Science |date=2017 |publisher=Indiana University Press}}

McClure's also serialized Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912). While most reviews were favorable,{{cite journal |last1=Castor |first1=Laura |title=Willa Cather, Alexander's Bridge Historical essay and explanatory notes by Tom Quirk, textual essay and editing by Frederick M. Link. |journal=American Studies in Scandinavia |year=2008 |volume=40 |issue=1–2 |pages=167–170 |doi=10.22439/asca.v40i1-2.4688}}{{cite journal |last1=Morris |first1=Lloyd |title=Willa Cather |journal=The North American Review |year=1924 |volume=219 |issue=822 |pages=641–652 |jstor=25113302 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/25113302 |issn=0029-2397}} including The Atlantic's, which called the writing "deft and skillful,"The Atlantic. November 1912, p. 683. Cather herself soon saw the novel as weak and shallow.{{cite book |last1=Bloom |first1=Edward A. |last2=Bloom |first2=Lillian D. |title=Willa Cather's gift of sympathy |date=1962 |publisher=Southern Illinois University Press |page=9}}

She followed Alexander's Bridge with three novels set in the Great Plains, which eventually became both popular and critical successes: O Pioneers! (1913),{{cite journal |last1=Kitch |first1=Carolyn |title=The Work That Came Before the Art: Willa Cather as Journalist, 1893–1912 |journal=American Journalism |date=July 1997 |volume=14 |issue=3–4 |pages=425–440 |doi=10.1080/08821127.1997.10731934 |language=en |issn=0882-1127}} The Song of the Lark (1915),{{cite journal |last1=Garvelink |first1=Lisa Bouma |title=The Nature of the Life of the Artist in Willa Cather's "The Song of the Lark" |journal=CEA Critic |year=2013 |volume=75 |issue=3 |pages=270–277 |jstor=44378518 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/44378518 |issn=0007-8069}} and My Ántonia (1918).{{cite journal |last1=O'BRIEN |first1=SHARON |title=Possession and Publication: Willa Cather's Struggle to Save "My Ántonia" |journal=Studies in the Novel |year=2013 |volume=45 |issue=3 |pages=460–475 |jstor=23594852 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23594852 |issn=0039-3827}} Taken together, they are sometimes referred to as her "Prairie Trilogym"{{cite journal |last1=Old |first1=James Paul |title=Wandering over Boundless Fields: The Fiction of Willa Cather and the Reformation of Communal Memory |journal=American Political Thought |date=September 2018 |volume=7 |issue=4 |pages=565–587 |doi=10.1086/699908|s2cid=158530806 }}{{cite journal |last1=Eggan |first1=Taylor A. |title=Landscape Metaphysics: Narrative Architecture and the Focalisation of the Environment |journal=English Studies |date=May 19, 2018 |volume=99 |issue=4 |pages=398–411 |doi=10.1080/0013838X.2018.1475594 |s2cid=165304534 |language=en |issn=0013-838X}} a succession of plains-based novels that drew praise for their use of plainspoken language about ordinary people.{{cite news |title=Ranks Miss Cather 1st Woman Novelist |work=Hastings Daily Tribune |date=March 15, 1919 |page=5}}{{cite news |title=The Greatness of Willa Cather |work=The Times Dispatch (Richmond, VA) |agency=Norfolk Virginian-Pilot |date=April 29, 1947 |page=8}} Sinclair Lewis, for example, lauded her for making Nebraska accessible to the wider world for the first time.Omaha World-Herald, April 9, 1921. After writing The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald lamented that it was a failure in comparison to My Ántonia.{{cite journal |last1=Kundu |first1=Gautam |title=Inadvertent Echoes or 'An Instance of Apparent Plagiarism'? Cather's "My Ántonia, A Lost Lady" and Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" |journal=Études Anglaises |year=1998 |volume=51 |issue=3 |page=326}}

By 1920, Cather was dissatisfied with her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, which had devoted an advertising budget of only $300 to My Ántonia;{{Cite book|title=The lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire|last=Claridge|first=Laura|publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux|year=2016|isbn=978-0-374-11425-1|edition= First|pages=63–65|oclc=908176194}} refused to pay for all the illustrations she had commissioned from Władysław T. Benda for the book; and produced a poorly and cheaply made volume.{{cite journal |last1=Harris |first1=Richard C. |title="Dear Alfred"/"Dear Miss Cather": Willa Cather and Alfred Knopf, 1920—1947 |journal=Studies in the Novel |year=2013 |volume=45 |issue=3 |pages=387–407 |jstor=23594849 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23594849 |issn=0039-3827}} So, that year, she turned to the young publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf, which had a reputation for supporting its authors through advertising campaigns. She also liked the look of its books and had been impressed with its edition of Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson. She so appreciated their style that all her Knopf books of the 1920s (save for one printing of her short story collection Youth and the Bright Medusa) matched its design on their second and subsequent printings.{{cite journal |last1=Ronning |first1=Kari A. |title=Speaking Volumes: Embodying Cather's Works |journal=Studies in the Novel |year=2013 |volume=45 |issue=3 |pages=519–537 |jstor=23594855 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23594855 |issn=0039-3827}}

Cather was, by then, firmly established as a major American writer, receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her World War I-based novel, One of Ours. She followed it with the popular Death Comes for the Archbishop in 1927, selling 86,500 copies in just two years.{{cite journal |last1=Jaillant |first1=Lise |title=Canonical in the 1930s: Willa Cather's "Death Comes for the Archbishop" in the Modern Library Series |journal=Studies in the Novel |year=2013 |volume=45 |issue=3 |pages=476–499 |jstor=23594853 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23594853 |issn=0039-3827}} It has been included on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the 20th century.

Two of her three other novels of the decade—A Lost Lady and The Professor's House—elevated her literary status dramatically. She was invited to give several hundred public lectures, earned significant royalties, and sold the movie rights to A Lost Lady. Yet her other novel of the decade, My Mortal Enemy, published in 1926, received no widespread acclaim—and neither she nor her life partner, Edith Lewis, made significant mention of it later in their lives.{{cite journal |last1=Vanderlaan |first1=Kim |title=Sacred Spaces, Profane "Manufactories": Willa Cather's Split Artist in The Professor's House and My Mortal Enemy |journal=Western American Literature |year=2011 |volume=46 |issue=1 |pages=4–24 |doi=10.1353/wal.2011.0035|s2cid=144199893 }}

Despite her success, she was also subject to harsh criticism, particularly surrounding One of Ours. Her close friend, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, saw the novel as a betrayal of the realities of war, not understanding how to "bridge the gap between [Cather's] idealized war vision ... and my own stark impressions of war as lived."{{cite journal |last1=Garvelink |first1=Lisa Bouma |title=Willa Cather's Voyage Perilous: A Case for One of Ours |journal=Women's Studies |date=October 2004 |volume=33 |issue=7 |pages=907–931 |doi=10.1080/00497870490503851|s2cid=145563235 }} Similarly, Ernest Hemingway took issue with her portrayal of war, writing in a 1923 letter, "Wasn't [the novel's] last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode after episode, Catherized. Poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere."{{cite web |last1=Onion |first1=Rebecca |title=On the Sexist Reception of Willa Cather's World War I Novel |url=https://lithub.com/on-the-sexist-reception-of-willa-cathers-world-war-i-novel/ |website=Literary Hub |date=October 21, 2019}}

In 1929, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.{{Cite web|url=https://www.artsandletters.org/membership|title=Membership (search under deceased not all)|website=American Academy of Arts and Letters}}

By the 1930s, an increasingly large share of critics began to dismiss her as overly romantic and nostalgic, unable to grapple with contemporary issues:{{cite book |last1=Clere |first1=Sarah E. |title=Troubling Bodies in the Fiction of Willa Cather |date=2011 |publisher=University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |page=5}} Granville Hicks, for instance, charged Cather with escaping into an idealized past to avoid confronting the problems of the present.{{cite journal |last1=Hicks |first1=Granville |title=The Case against Willa Cather |journal=The English Journal |year=1933 |volume=22 |issue=9 |pages=703–710 |doi=10.2307/804321 |jstor=804321 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/804321 |issn=0013-8274|url-access=subscription }}{{cite journal |last1=O'Brien |first1=Sharon |title=Becoming Noncanonical: The Case Against Willa Cather |journal=American Quarterly |year=1988 |volume=40 |issue=1 |pages=110–126 |doi=10.2307/2713144 |jstor=2713144 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2713144 |issn=0003-0678|url-access=subscription }} And it was particularly in the context of the hardships of the Great Depression in which her work was seen as lacking social relevance.{{cite journal |last1=Old |first1=James Paul |title=Making Good Americans: The Politics of Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop |journal=Perspectives on Political Science |date=January 2, 2021 |volume=50 |issue=1 |pages=52–61 |doi=10.1080/10457097.2020.1830673 |issn=1045-7097 |s2cid=225123832 }} Similarly, critics—and Cather herself{{cite journal |last1=Urgo |first1=Joseph |title=Review of Willa Cather and Material Culture: Real-World Writing, Writing the Real World |journal=South Atlantic Review |year=2005 |volume=70 |issue=2 |pages=182–186 |jstor=20064654 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/20064654 |issn=0277-335X}}—were disappointed when her novel A Lost Lady was made into a film; the film had little resemblance to the novel.{{cite news |last1=Melcher |first1=E. de S. |title=Willa Cather Novel Loses Much in the Screen Story |work=Evening Star (Washington, D.C.) |date=November 17, 1934 |page=21}}{{cite news |last1=C. |first1=E.N. |title=Literary Topics |work=Hartford Courant |date=September 5, 1934 |page=8}}

Cather's lifelong conservative politics,{{cite journal |last1=Frus |first1=Phyllis |last2=Corkin |first2=Stanley |title=Cather Criticism and the American Canon |journal=College English |year=1997 |volume=59 |issue=2 |pages=206–217 |doi=10.2307/378552 |jstor=378552 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/378552 |issn=0010-0994|url-access=subscription }}{{efn-ua|Not all critics see her 1930s political views as conservative; Reynolds argues that while she was reactionary later in life, she subscribed to a form of rural populism and progressivism, built on the continuity of community,{{cite book |last1=Reynolds |first1=Guy |title=The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather |date=2006 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-1-139-00086-4 |pages=19–34 |chapter=Willa Cather as progressive}} and Clasen views her as a progressive.{{cite journal |last1=Clasen |first1=Kelly |title=Feminists of the Middle Border: Willa Cather, Hamlin Garland, and the Female Land Ethic |journal=CEA Critic |year=2013 |volume=75 |issue=2 |pages=93–108 |jstor=44378769 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/44378769 |issn=0007-8069}} Similarly, it has been suggested she was distinctly opaque, and that in terms of literary innovation, she was solidly progressive, even radical.{{cite journal |last1=Arnold |first1=Marilyn |title=Willa Cather's Artistic "Radicalism" |journal=CEA Critic |year=1989 |volume=51 |issue=4 |pages=2–10 |jstor=44377562 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/44377562 |issn=0007-8069}}{{cite journal |last1=Goldberg |first1=Jonathan |title=Photographic Relations: Laura Gilpin, Willa Cather |journal=American Literature |year=1998 |volume=70 |issue=1 |pages=63–95 |doi=10.2307/2902456 |jstor=2902456 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2902456 |issn=0002-9831|url-access=subscription }}}} appealing to critics such as Mencken, Randolph Bourne, and Carl Van Doren, soured her reputation with younger, often left-leaning critics like Hicks and Edmund Wilson.{{cite journal|last=Decker|first=James M.|title=Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism|journal=Modern Language Review|date=April 2003|doi=10.2307/3737843|jstor=3737843}}{{cite journal |last1=Nealon |first1=Christopher |title=Affect-Genealogy: Feeling and Affiliation in Willa Cather |journal=American Literature |year=1997 |volume=69 |issue=1 |pages=5–37 |doi=10.2307/2928167 |jstor=2928167 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2928167 |issn=0002-9831|url-access=subscription }} Despite this critical opposition to her work, Cather remained a popular writer whose novels and short story collections continued to sell well; in 1931 Shadows on the Rock was the most widely read novel in the United States, and Lucy Gayheart became a bestseller in 1935.

Although Cather made her last trip to Red Cloud in 1931 for a family gathering after her mother's death, she stayed in touch with her Red Cloud friends and sent money to Annie Pavelka and other families during the Depression years.{{r|Lee1990|page=327}} In 1932, Cather published Obscure Destinies, her final collection of short fiction, which contained "Neighbour Rosicky," one of her most highly regarded stories. That same summer, she moved into a new apartment on Park Avenue with Edith Lewis, and during a visit on Grand Manan, she probably began working on her next novel, Lucy Gayheart.{{cite journal |last1=Homestead |first1=Melissa |title=Yet More Cather-Knopf Correspondence |journal=Willa Cather Review |year=2017 |volume=59 |issue=2 |page=3}}{{efn-ua|Some sources indicate that Cather began writing Lucy Gayheart in 1933.{{cite journal |last1=Giannone |first1=Richard |title=Music, Silence, and the Spirituality of Willa Gather |journal=Renascence |year=2005 |volume=57 |issue=2 |pages=123–149 |doi=10.5840/renascence20055723}}{{cite book |last1=Baker |first1=Deena Michelle |title="What now?": Willa Cather's successful male professionals at middle age |date=2006 |page=41 |url=https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4240&context=etd-project}} Homestead argues instead that she truly began writing in the summer of 1932. Some sources agree with her.{{cite book |last1=Lindemann |first1=Marilee |title=The Cambridge companion to Willa Cather |date=2005 |publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-52793-4 |page=xx |edition=1st}}{{cite journal |last1=Porter |first1=David |title=From The Song of the Lark to Lucy Gayheart, and Die Walküre to Die Winterreise |journal=Cather Studies |year=2017 |volume=11 |doi=10.2307/j.ctt1qv5psc.12 |url=https://cather.unl.edu/scholarship/catherstudies/11/cs011.porter |access-date=February 1, 2021|url-access=subscription }} Others are imprecise or ambiguous.{{cite journal |last1=Porter |first1=David |title=Following the Lieder: Cather, Schubert, and Lucy Gayheart |journal=Cather Studies |year=2015 |volume=10 |doi=10.2307/j.ctt1d98c6j.19 |url=https://cather.unl.edu/scholarship/catherstudies/10/cs010.porter |access-date=February 1, 2021|url-access=subscription }}{{cite book |last1=Harvey |first1=Sally Elizabeth Peltier |title=Willa Cather: Redefining the American Dream |year=1992}}{{cite book |last1=Johnston |first1=William Winfred |title=MUSIC IN THE FICTION OF WILLA CATHER |date=1953 |page=176 |url=https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc130334/m2/1/high_res_d/n_02230.pdf}}{{cite book |last1=Randall |first1=John Herman |title=The landscape and the looking glass; Willa Cather's search for value |date=1960 |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |page=353}} Her idea for the story may have been formed as early as the 1890s (using the name Gayhardt instead of Gayheart, based on a woman she met at a party),{{cite book |last1=Edel |first1=Leon |title=Willa Cather, the paradox of success; a lecture delivered under the auspices of the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund in the Coolidge Auditorium |date=1960 |publisher=Library of Congress |page=13}} and it is possible she began writing as early as 1926{{cite book |last1=Stout |first1=Janis P. |title=Cather among the moderns |date=2019 |publisher=University of Alabama Press |isbn=978-0-817-32014-0 |page=68}}{{cite web |last1=Cather |first1=Willa |title=Louise Guerber (October 15 [1926]) {{!}} Willa Cather Archive |url=https://cather.unl.edu/writings/letters/let2871 |website=cather.unl.edu |access-date=February 1, 2021 |date=1926}}{{cite journal |last1=Porter |first1=David |title=1926: Blue Eyes on the Platte Enters Gayheartedly |journal=Willa Cather Newsletter & Review |year=2013 |volume=56 |issue=2 |page=32}} or 1927.{{cite journal |last1=Chown |first1=Linda |title="It Came Closer than That": Willa Cather's Lucy Gayheart |journal=Cather Studies |year=1993 |volume=2 |url=https://cather.unl.edu/scholarship/catherstudies/2/cs002.closer |access-date=February 8, 2021}} While she intended to name the novel Blue Eyes on the Platte early on, she changed the title{{cite journal |journal=Nebraskaland |year=1966 |volume=44 |page=56 |publisher=Nebraska Game and Parks Commission | title=Daughter of the Prairies}} and made Lucy's eyes brown.{{cite journal |last1=BENNETT |first1=MILDRED R. |title=Willa Cather's Bodies for Ghosts |journal=Western American Literature |year=1982 |volume=17 |issue=1 |page=45 |jstor=43020206 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/43020206 |issn=0043-3462}} Stout suggests mention of Blue Eyes on the Platte may have been facetious, only beginning to write and think about Lucy Gayheart in 1933. This is contradicted by Edith Lewis insisting that not only did she begin working on Blue Eyes on the Platte "several years before" 1933, but that it was the precursor to Lucy Gayheart.{{cite book |last1=Cather |first1=Willa |editor1-last=Porter |editor1-first=David H. |editor1-link=Historical essay |title=Lucy Gayheart |date=August 2015 |isbn=978-0-803-27687-1 |page=288 |publisher=U of Nebraska Press |edition=Willa Cather Scholarly}} Regardless of which of these details are true, it is known that Cather reused images from her 1911 short story, "The Joy of Nelly Deane", in Lucy Gayheart.{{cite journal |last1=Rosowski |first1=Susan J. |title=Willa Cather's female landscapes: The song of the lark and Lucy Gayheart |journal=Women's Studies |date=December 1984 |volume=11 |issue=3 |pages=233–246 |doi=10.1080/00497878.1984.9978614}}{{cite book |last1=Baker |first1=Deena Michelle |title="What now?": Willa Cather's successful male professionals at middle age middle age |date=2006 |publisher=California State University, San Bernardino |page=6}} "The Joy of Nelly Deane" may be best understood as an earlier version of Lucy Gayheart altogether.}} She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1934.{{Cite web |title=APS Member History |url=https://search.amphilsoc.org/memhist/search?creator=Willa+Cather&title=&subject=&subdiv=&mem=&year=&year-max=&dead=&keyword=&smode=advanced |access-date=2023-06-16 |website=search.amphilsoc.org}}

Cather suffered two devastating losses in 1938.{{cite web |last1=Cather |first1=Willa |title=Dorothy Canfield Fisher (March 5 [1939]) {{!}} Willa Cather Archive |url=https://cather.unl.edu/writings/letters/let1440 |website=cather.unl.edu |date=March 5, 1939}}{{cite web |last1=Cather |first1=Willa |title=Ferris Greenslet (October 12 [1938]) {{!}} Willa Cather Archive |url=https://cather.unl.edu/writings/letters/let1419 |website=cather.unl.edu |date=October 12, 1938 |quote=They were the two people dearest to me.}}{{cite web |last1=Cather |first1=Willa |title=Mary Willard (May 6, 1941) {{!}} Willa Cather Archive |url=https://cather.unl.edu/writings/letters/let1540 |website=cather.unl.edu |date=May 6, 1941 |quote=I have waited for some days to turn to you, because I seemed unable to utter anything but a cry of grief and bitter disappointment. Only Isabelle's death and the death of my brother Douglass have cut me so deep. The feeling I have, all the time, is that so much of my life has been cut away.}} In June, her favorite brother, Douglass, died of a heart attack. Cather was too grief-stricken to attend the funeral.{{r|Woodress|page=478}} Four months later, Isabelle McClung died. Cather and McClung had lived together when Cather first arrived in Pittsburgh, and while McClung eventually married the musician Jan Hambourg and moved with her husband to Toronto,Koch, Eric (1997). The Brothers Hambourg{{cite book|last1=Gatenby|first1=Greg|title=The Wild is Always There: Canada through the eyes of foreign writers|date=1993|publisher=Alfred A. Knopf Canada|isbn=978-0-39428-023-3 |page=[https://archive.org/details/wildisalwaysther0000unse/page/215 215]|url=https://archive.org/details/wildisalwaysther0000unse/page/215}} the two women remained devoted friends.{{cite journal |last1=Stouck |first1=David |title=Marriage and Friendship in "My Ántonia" |journal=Great Plains Quarterly |year=1982 |volume=2 |issue=4 |pages=224–231 |jstor=24467939 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/24467939 |issn=0275-7664}}{{cite journal |last1=Mason |first1=Julian |title=An Interesting Willa Cather Letter |journal=American Literature |year=1986 |volume=58 |issue=1 |pages=109–111 |doi=10.2307/2925947 |jstor=2925947 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2925947 |issn=0002-9831|url-access=subscription }}{{efn-ua|Cather wrote hundreds of letters to McClung over her life, and most of them were returned to Cather by McClung's husband. Almost all of these were destroyed.{{cite journal |last1=Pritchard |first1=William H. |title=Epistolary Cather |journal=The Hudson Review |year=2013 |volume=66 |issue=2 |pages=387–394 |jstor=43488733 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/43488733 |issn=0018-702X}}{{cite journal |last1=Jewell |first1=Andrew |title=Why Obscure the Record? The Psychological Context of Willa Cather's Ban on Letter Publication |journal=Biography |year=2017 |volume=40 |issue=3 |pages=399–424 |jstor=26405083 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/26405083 |issn=0162-4962}}}} Cather wrote that Isabelle was the person for whom she wrote all her books.{{cite book |last1=Thomas |first1=Susie |title=Willa Cather |date=1990 |publisher=Macmillan Education |isbn=978-0-33342-360-8 |page=13}}

During the summer of 1940, Cather and Lewis went to Grand Manan for the last time, and Cather finished her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a book much darker in tone and subject matter than her previous works.{{r|Woodress|page=483}}{{cite news |last1=Walton |first1=David |title=Putting Cather into Perspective |work=The Philadelphia Inquirer |date=March 4, 1990 |page=3-J}} While Sapphira is understood by readers as lacking a moral sense and failing to evoke empathy,{{cite journal |last1=Salas |first1=Angela M. |title=Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl: Extending the Boundaries of the Body |journal=College Literature |year=1997 |volume=24 |issue=2 |pages=97–108 |jstor=25112300 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/25112300 |issn=0093-3139}} the novel was a great critical and commercial success, with an advance printing of 25,000 copies. It was then adopted by the Book of the Month Club,{{cite news |title=Sensational Autobiography Chosen |work=The Times Dispatch (Richmond, Virginia) |date=December 8, 1940 |page=76}} which bought more than 200,000 copies.{{cite journal |last1=Jaap |first1=James A. |title=Breaking Fresh Ground: New Releases from the Willa Cather Edition |journal=Resources for American Literary Study |year=2009 |volume=34 |pages=215–222 |doi=10.7756/rals.034.009.215-222 |jstor=26367245 |s2cid=163536829 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/26367245 |issn=0048-7384|url-access=subscription }} Her final story, "The Best Years",{{cite book |last1=Cather |first1=Willa |title=Youth and the Bright Medusa: The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition |date=2009 |publisher=University of Nebraska Press |url=https://cather.unl.edu/writings/books/0021}} intended as a gift for her brother,{{cite book |last1=Burgess |first1=Cheryll |title=Willa Cather : family, community, and history (the BYU symposium) |date=1990 |publisher=Brigham Young University, Humanities Publications Center |isbn=0842522999 |page=52 |chapter=Cather's Homecomings}} was retrospective. It contained images or "keepsakes" from each of her twelve published novels and the short stories in Obscure Destinies.{{cite journal |last1=Skaggs |first1=Merrill Maguire |title=Icons and Willa Cather |journal=Cather Studies |year=2007 |volume=7 |doi=10.2307/j.ctt1djmfsp.23 |url=https://cather.unl.edu/scholarship/catherstudies/7/cs007.skaggs|url-access=subscription }}

Although an inflamed tendon in her hand hampered her writing, Cather managed to finish a substantial part of a novel set in Avignon, France. She had titled it Hard Punishments and placed it in the 14th century during the reign of Antipope Benedict XIV.{{r|Lee1990|page=371}} She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943.{{cite web |last1=Cather |first1=Willa |title=Women's History Month |url=https://www.amacad.org/archives/gallery/womens-history-month |website=American Academy of Arts & Sciences |access-date=February 3, 2021 |language=en}} The same year, she executed a will that prohibited the publication of her letters and dramatization of her works. In 1944, she received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, a prestigious award given for an author's total accomplishments.{{cite news |title=MISS CATHER WINS INSTITUTE AWARD |work=The New York Times |date=January 28, 1944 |page=13}}

Cather was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 1945 and underwent a mastectomy on January 14, 1946.{{r|Homestead|pages=294–295}} By early 1947, her cancer had metastasized to her liver, becoming stage IV cancer.{{r|Homestead|page=296}}On April 24, 1947, Cather died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 73 in her home at 570 Park Avenue in Manhattan.{{cite news |title=Author of Lost Lady Won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922 for Writing One of Ours|url=https://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1207.html |newspaper=The New York Times |date=April 25, 1947 |access-date= January 18, 2014 }}{{cite news |last1=Mulligan |first1=Hugh A. |title=Visiting Willa Cather: Sabbatical of the Heart |work=The Shreveport Journal |agency=Associated Press |date=February 13, 1980 |page=52}} After Cather's death, Edith Lewis destroyed the manuscript of Hard Punishments according to Cather's instructions.{{cite journal |last1=Homestead |first1=Melissa J. |title=Cather, Willa |journal=The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction |date=December 24, 2010 |volume=II |doi=10.1002/9781444337822.wbetcfv2c005|isbn=978-1-444-33782-2 }} She is buried at the southwest corner of Jaffrey, New Hampshire's Old Burying Ground,Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Location 7776). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.{{cite news |last1=Swanson |first1=Stevenson |title=Scholars ponder why writer of Plains chose burial in East |url=https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2003-07-13-0307130239-story.html |access-date=February 2, 2021 |work=Chicago Tribune |date=July 13, 2003}}{{cite journal |last1=Homestead |first1=Melissa J. |last2=Kaufman |first2=Anne L. |title=Nebraska, New England, New York: Mapping the Foreground of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis's Creative Partnership |journal=Western American Literature |year=2008 |volume=43 |issue=1 |page=46 |doi=10.1353/wal.2008.0050|s2cid=160102859 |url=https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/77 |url-access=subscription }} a place she first visited when joining Isabelle McClung and her husband, violinist Jan Hambourg,{{cite journal |last1=Gleason |first1=John B. |title=The "Case" of Willa Cather |journal=Western American Literature |volume=20 |issue=4 |pages=275–299 |doi=10.1353/wal.1986.0072 |year=1986|s2cid=165975307 }} at the Shattuck Inn.{{cite web|url=http://www.yankeemagazine.com/article/travel/yankee-locals-monadnock/willa-cather-grave|title=Jaffrey: Willa Cather's Last Page|access-date=April 9, 2014|date=September 9, 2008|archive-date=April 13, 2014|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140413144827/http://www.yankeemagazine.com/article/travel/yankee-locals-monadnock/willa-cather-grave|url-status=dead}}{{cite journal |last1=Bean |first1=Margaret C. |title=Willa Cather in Jaffrey |journal=Studies in Jaffrey History |year=2005 |volume=1 |page=5}} Lewis was buried alongside Cather some 25 years later.{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1972/08/12/archives/edith-lewis-friend-of-willa-cather.html |title=Edith Lewis, Friend of Willa Cather |date=August 12, 1972 |newspaper=The New York Times |accessdate=February 7, 2018}}

Novels

• Alexander's Bridge (1912)
• O Pioneers! (1913)
• The Song of the Lark (1915)
• My Ántonia (1918)
• One of Ours (1922)
• A Lost Lady (1923)
• The Professor's House (1925)
• My Mortal Enemy (1926)
• Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
• Shadows on the Rock (1931)
• Lucy Gayheart (1935)
• Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940)

Short fiction

• The Troll Garden (1905)
• Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920)
• Obscure Destinies (1932)
• Neighbour Rosicky (1932)
• The Old Beauty and Others (1948)
• Five Stories (1956)
• Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction, 1892–1912 (1965)
• Uncle Valentine and Other Stories: Willa Cather's Uncollected Short Fiction, 1915–1929 (1972)

Poetry

• April Twilights (1903)
• April Twilights and Other Poems (1923)

Nonfiction and Prose Collections

• Not Under Forty (1936)
• The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893-1896 (1966)
• The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902 (1970)

File:Willa-Cather-at-Mesa-Verde-ca1915.jpg

Scholars disagree about Cather's sexual identity. Some believe it impossible or anachronistic to determine whether she had same-sex attraction,{{cite book |last1=Cather |first1=Willa |editor1-last=Sharistanian |editor1-first=Janet |title=My Antonia |year=2008 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19953-814-0 |page=xiii |edition=New}}{{cite magazine |last1=Acocella |first1=Joan |title=What's in Cather's Letters |url=https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/whats-in-cathers-letters |magazine=The New Yorker |date=April 9, 2013 |language=en-us}} while others disagree.{{cite book |last1=Lindemann |first1=Marilee |title=Willa Cather, queering America |year=1999 |publisher=Columbia University Press |isbn=978-0-23111-325-0 |page=25}}{{cite journal |last1=Flannigan |first1=John F. |title=Issues of Gender and Lesbian Love: Goblins in "The Garden Lodge" |journal=Cather Studies |volume=2 |url=https://cather.unl.edu/scholarship/catherstudies/2/cs002.goblins}}{{cite journal |last1=Ammons |first1=Elizabeth |title=Cather and the New Canon: "The Old Beauty" and the Issue of Empire |journal=Cather Studies |volume=3 |url=https://cather.unl.edu/scholarship/catherstudies/3/cs003.canon |quote=Despite her sympathetic portraits of northern and eastern European gentile immigrants and her own status as a closeted lesbian writer in an increasingly homophobic era, Willa Cather was in key ways reactionary and racist.}} Researcher Deborah Carlin suggests that denial of Cather being a lesbian is rooted in treating same-sex desire "as an insult to Cather and her reputation", rather than a neutral historical perspective.{{cite journal |last1=Carlin |first1=Deborah |title=Review of Willa Cather's Sexual Aesthetics and the Male Homosexual Literary Tradition by John P. Anders & Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism by Joan Acocella |journal=Great Plains Quarterly |date=January 1, 2001 |volume=21 |issue=1 |url=https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/2288}} Melissa Homestead has argued that Cather was attracted to Edith Lewis, and in so doing, asked: "What kind of evidence is needed to establish this as a lesbian relationship? Photographs of the two of them in bed together? She was an integral part of Cather's life, creatively and personally." Beyond her own relationships with women, Cather's reliance on male characters has been used to support the idea of her same-sex attraction.{{cite book |last1=O'Brien |first1=Sharon |title=Willa Cather : the emerging voice |year=1987 |isbn=978-0-19504-132-3 |pages=215–216|publisher=Oxford University Press }}{{efn-ua|Some scholars also use this male-centered narrative approach to read Cather as transmasculine{{cite journal |last1=Hammer |first1=K. Allison |title=Epic Stone Butch |journal=TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly |date=February 1, 2020 |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=77–98 |doi=10.1215/23289252-7914528|s2cid=214352736 }} or just masculine.{{cite book |last1=Pernal |first1=Mary |title=Explorations in contemporary feminist literature : the battle against oppression for writers of color, lesbian and transgender communities |date=2002 |publisher=P. Lang |isbn=978-0-82045-662-1 |page=18}}{{cite book |last1=Butler |first1=Judith |title=Bodies that matter : on the discursive limits of "sex" |date=1993 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-0-41590-366-0 |chapter="Dangerous Crossing": Willa Cather's Masculine Names}}}} Harold Bloom calls her "erotically evasive in her art" due to prevailing "societal taboos".{{cite book|author-first=Harold|author-last=Bloom|title=Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds|publisher=Warner|page=633}}

In any event, throughout Cather's adult life, her closest relationships were with women. These included her college friend Louise Pound; the Pittsburgh socialite Isabelle McClung, with whom Cather traveled to Europe and at whose Toronto home she stayed for prolonged visits;{{cite book|last1=Gatenby|first1=Greg|title=The Wild is Always There: Canada through the eyes of foreign writers|date=1993|publisher=Alfred A. Knopf Canada|isbn=0-394-28023-7|page=[https://archive.org/details/wildisalwaysther0000unse/page/214 214]|url=https://archive.org/details/wildisalwaysther0000unse/page/214}} the opera singer Olive Fremstad;{{cite journal |last1=Boutry |first1=Katherine |title=Between Registers: Coming In and Out Through Musical Performance in Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark |journal=Legacy |year=2000 |volume=17 |issue=2 |pages=187–198 |doi=10.1353/leg.2000.0003 |jstor=25679337 |s2cid=161309296 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/25679337 |issn=0748-4321|url-access=subscription }} and most notably, the editor Edith Lewis, with whom Cather lived the last 39 years of her life.{{cite journal |last1=Griswold |first1=Wendy |last2=Michelson |first2=Anna |title=The Outsider's Edge: Geography, Gender, and Sexuality in the Local Color Movement |journal=Sociological Forum |date=September 2020 |volume=35 |issue=3 |pages=628–647 |doi=10.1111/socf.12622|s2cid=225426519 }}

Cather's relationship with Lewis began in the early 1900s. They lived together in a series of apartments in New York City from 1908 until Cather's death in 1947. From 1913 to 1927, Cather and Lewis lived at No. 5 Bank Street in Greenwich Village.{{cite journal |last1=Jewell |first1=Andrew |title=Willa Cather's Greenwich Village: New Contexts for "Coming, Aphrodite!" |journal=Studies in American Fiction |year=2004 |volume=32 |issue=1 |pages=59–80 |doi=10.1353/saf.2004.0009|s2cid=162380556 |url=http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1108&context=libraryscience |url-access=subscription }} They moved when the apartment was scheduled for demolition during the construction of the Broadway–Seventh Avenue New York City Subway line (now the {{NYCS trains|Broadway-Seventh}}).{{cite book |last1=Bunyan |first1=Patrick |title=All Around the Town: Amazing Manhattan Facts and Curiosities |year=2011 |isbn=978-0-823-23174-4 |page=66 |publisher=Empire State Editions |edition=Second}}{{cite journal |last1=Stout |first1=Janis P. |title=Autobiography as Journey in The Professor's House |journal=Studies in American Fiction |year=1991 |volume=19 |issue=2 |pages=203–215 |doi=10.1353/saf.1991.0019|s2cid=161087364 }} While Lewis was selected as the literary trustee for Cather's estate, she was not merely a secretary for Cather's documents but an integral part of Cather's creative process.{{cite journal |last1=Homestead |first1=Melissa J. |title=Willa Cather, Edith lewis, and Collaboration: The Southwestern Novels of the 1920s and Beyond |journal=Studies in the Novel |year=2013 |volume=45 |issue=3 |pages=408–441 |jstor=23594850 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23594850 |issn=0039-3827}}

Beginning in 1922, Cather spent summers on the island of Grand Manan in New Brunswick, where she bought a cottage in Whale Cove on the Bay of Fundy. This is where her short story "Before Breakfast" is set.{{cite journal |last1=Thacker |first1=Robert |title=Alice Munro's Willa Cather |journal=Canadian Literature |year=1992 |volume=134 |issue=Autumn 1992 |pages=43–57}} She valued the seclusion of the island and did not mind that her cottage had neither indoor plumbing nor electricity. Anyone wishing to reach her could do so by telegraph or mail.{{r|Woodress|page=415}} In 1940, she stopped visiting Grand Manan after Canada's entrance to World War II, as travel was considerably more difficult; she also began a long recuperation from gallbladder surgery in 1942 that restricted travel.{{cite journal |last1=Harbison |first1=Sherrill |title=Willa Cather and Sigrid Undset: The Correspondence in Oslo |journal=Resources for American Literary Study |year=2000 |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=240 |doi=10.1353/rals.2000.0024|s2cid=162396411 }}{{r|Homestead|pp=266–268}}

A resolutely private person, Cather destroyed many drafts, personal papers, and letters, asking others to do the same.{{cite journal |last1=Simmons |first1=Thomas E. |title=A Will for Willa Cather |journal=Missouri Law Review |year=2018 |volume=83 |issue=3}} While many complied, some did not.{{cite journal |last1=Stout |first1=Janis P. |title=Between Candor and Concealment: Willa Cather and (Auto)Biography |journal=Biography |year=2009 |volume=32 |issue=3 |pages=467–492 |jstor=23540820 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23540820 |issn=0162-4962}} Her will restricted the ability of scholars to quote from the personal papers that remain. But in April 2013, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather—a collection of 566 letters Cather wrote to friends, family, and literary acquaintances such as Thornton Wilder and F. Scott Fitzgerald—was published, two years after the death of Cather's nephew and second literary executor, Charles Cather. Willa Cather's correspondence revealed the complexity of her character and inner world.Christopher Benfey. [https://newrepublic.com/article/114897/willa-cathers-letters-reviewed-willa-cathers-wrath-tnr Willa Cather's Correspondence Reveals Something New: The rage of a great American novelist], The New Republic, October 12, 2013. The letters do not disclose any intimate details about Cather's personal life, but they do "make clear that [her] primary emotional attachments were to women."Schuessler, Jennifer. "O Revelations! Letters, Once Banned, Flesh Out Willa Cather". The New York Times. March 22, 2013, A1. The Willa Cather Archive at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln works to digitize her complete body of writing, including private correspondence and published work. As of 2021, about 2,100 letters have been made freely available to the public, in addition to transcription of her own published writing.{{cite web |title=About {{!}} Willa Cather Archive |url=https://cather.unl.edu/about/introduction |website=cather.unl.edu |access-date=December 26, 2019}}{{cite web |title=The Complete Letters {{!}} Willa Cather Archive |url=https://cather.unl.edu/writings/letters |website=cather.unl.edu |access-date=February 3, 2021}}

Cather admired Henry James's use of language and characterization.{{cite book |last1=Cather |first1=Willa |editor1-last=Curtin |editor1-first=William M. |title=The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893–1902 |year=2004 |publisher=University of Nebraska Press |isbn=978-0-80321-544-3 |page=248 |edition=[Repr. of the 1970]}} While Cather enjoyed the novels of several women—including George Eliot,{{cite journal |last1=Laird |first1=David |title=Willa Cather's Women: Gender, Place, and Narrativity in "O Pioneers!" and "My Ántonia" |journal=Great Plains Quarterly |year=1992 |volume=12 |issue=4 |pages=242–253 |jstor=23531660 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23531660 |issn=0275-7664}} the Brontës, and Jane Austen—she regarded most women writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental.{{r|Woodress|page=110}} One contemporary exception was Sarah Orne Jewett, who became Cather's friend and mentor.{{efn-ua|Some sources describe the relationship using stronger language: as Cather being Jewett's protégé.{{cite news |last1=Rosenberg |first1=Liz |title=SARAH ORNE JEWETT: A 'NATURALLY AMERICAN' WRITER |url=https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1993-05-16-9305160494-story.html |access-date=February 4, 2021 |work=Chicago Tribune |date=May 16, 1993}}{{cite journal |last1=Shannon |first1=Laurie |title="The Country of Our Friendship": Jewett's Intimist Art |journal=American Literature |year=1999 |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=227–262 |jstor=2902810 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2902810 |issn=0002-9831}} Either way, Jewett's remarkable influence on Cather is evidenced not only by her commitment to regionalism,{{cite journal |last1=REYNOLDS |first1=GUY |title=The Transatlantic Virtual Salon: Cather and the British |journal=Studies in the Novel |year=2013 |volume=45 |issue=3 |pages=349–368 |jstor=23594847 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23594847 |issn=0039-3827}} but also by Cather's (perhaps overstated) role in editing The Country of the Pointed Firs.{{cite journal |last1=Homestead |first1=Melissa |title=Willa Cather Editing Sarah Orne Jewett |journal=American Literary Realism |year=2016 |volume=49 |issue=1 |pages=63–89 |doi=10.5406/amerlitereal.49.1.0063 |jstor=10.5406/amerlitereal.49.1.0063 |s2cid=164607316 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/amerlitereal.49.1.0063 |issn=1540-3084|url-access=subscription }}}} Jewett advised Cather of several things: to use female narrators in her fiction (even though Cather preferred using male perspectives),{{cite news |last1=Rose |first1=Phyllis |title=THE POINT OF VIEW WAS MASCULINE |work=The New York Times |date=September 11, 1983 |page=92}}{{cite journal |last1=Carlin |first1=Deborah |title=Cather's Jewett: Relationship, Influence, and Representation |journal=Cather Studies |year=2015 |volume=10 |doi=10.2307/j.ctt1d98c6j.12 |url=https://cather.unl.edu/scholarship/catherstudies/10/cs010.carlin|url-access=subscription }} to write about her "own country" (O Pioneers! was dedicated to Jewett),{{cite journal |last1=Cary |first1=Richard |title=The Sculptor and the Spinster: Jewett's "Influence"on Cather |journal=Colby Quarterly |year=1973 |volume=10 |issue=3 |pages=168–178}}{{cite journal |last1=Smith |first1=Eleanor M. |title=The Literary Relationship of Sarah Orne Jewett and Willa Sibert Cather |journal=The New England Quarterly |year=1956 |volume=29 |issue=4 |pages=472–492 |doi=10.2307/362140 |jstor=362140 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/362140 |issn=0028-4866|url-access=subscription }}{{cite journal |last1=Thorberg |first1=Raymond |title=Willa Cather: From Alexander's Bridge to My Antonia |journal=Twentieth Century Literature |year=1962 |volume=7 |issue=4 |pages=147–158 |doi=10.2307/440922 |jstor=440922 |url=http://www.jstor.com/stable/440922 |issn=0041-462X|url-access=subscription }} and to write fiction that explicitly represented romantic attraction between women.{{cite journal |last1=Homestead |first1=Melissa J. |title=Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the Historiography of Lesbian Sexuality |journal=Cather Studies |year=2015 |volume=10 |doi=10.2307/j.ctt1d98c6j.5 |url=https://cather.unl.edu/scholarship/catherstudies/10/cs010.homestead |access-date=February 4, 2021|url-access=subscription }}{{cite journal |last1=Donovan |first1=Josephine |title=The Unpublished Love Poems of Sarah Orne Jewett |journal=Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies |year=1979 |volume=4 |issue=3 |pages=26–31 |doi=10.2307/3346145 |jstor=3346145 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3346145 |issn=0160-9009 |quote=In fact, Jewett was quite aware of the temptation to fictionally disguise female-female relationships as heterosexual love stories, and consciously rejected it. One of her most pointed critical comments to the young Willa Cather was to advise her against doing this kind of "masquerading" in her future work.|url-access=subscription }}{{cite journal |last1=Pryse |first1=Marjorie |title=Sex, Class, and "Category Crisis": Reading Jewett's Transitivity |journal=American Literature |year=1998 |volume=70 |issue=3 |pages=517–549 |doi=10.2307/2902708 |jstor=2902708 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2902708 |issn=0002-9831|url-access=subscription }}{{efn-ua|Jewett wrote in a letter to Cather, "with what deep happiness and recognition I have read the "McClure" story,—night before last I found it with surprise and delight. It made me feel very near to the writer's young and loving heart. You have drawn your two figures of the wife and her husband with unerring touches and wonderful tenderness for her. It makes me the more sure that you are far on your road toward a fine and long story of very high class. The lover is as well done as he could be when a woman writes in the man's character,—it must always, I believe, be something of a masquerade. I think it is safer to write about him as you did about the others, and not try to be he! And you could almost have done it as yourself—a woman could love her in that same protecting way—a woman could even care enough to wish to take her away from such a life, by some means or other. But oh, how close—how tender—how true the feeling is!"{{cite book |last1=Jewett |first1=Sarah Orne |editor1-last=Fields |editor1-first=Annie |title=Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett |date=1911 |publisher=Houghton Mifflin company |pages=246–7}}}} Cather was also influenced by the work of Katherine Mansfield, praising in an essay Mansfield's ability "to throw a luminous streak out onto the shadowy realm of personal relationships."{{cite book |last1=Cather |first1=Willa |title=Not Under Forty |year=1936 |publisher=Alfred A. Knopf |page=135}}

Cather's high regard for the immigrant families forging lives and enduring hardships on the Nebraska plains shaped much of her fiction. The Burlington Depot in Red Cloud brought in many strange and wonderful people to her small town. As a child, she visited immigrant families in her area and returned home in "the most unreasonable state of excitement," feeling that she "had got inside another person's skin."{{r|bennet|pp=169–170}} After a trip to Red Cloud in 1916, Cather decided to write a novel based on the events in the life of her childhood friend Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a Bohemian girl who became the model for the title character in My Ántonia.{{cite journal |last1=Harris |first1=Richard C. |title=First Loves: Willa Cather's Niel Herbert and Ivan Turgenev's Vladimir Petrovich |journal=Studies in American Fiction |year=1989 |volume=17 |issue=1 |page=81 |doi=10.1353/saf.1989.0007|s2cid=161309570 }}{{cite journal |last1=MURPHY |first1=DAVID |title=Jejich Antonie: Czechs, the Land, Cather, and the Pavelka Farmstead |journal=Great Plains Quarterly |year=1994 |volume=14 |issue=2 |pages=85–106 |jstor=23531597 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23531597 |issn=0275-7664}} Cather was likewise fascinated by the French-Canadian pioneers from Quebec who had settled in the Red Cloud area while she was a girl.Danker, Kathleen (Winter 2000). "The Influence of Willa Cather's French-Canadian Neighbors in Nebraska in Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock." Great Plains Quarterly. p. 34.{{cite journal |last1=Carr |first1=Thomas M. |title=A French Canadian Community Becomes 'French Country': The 1912 Funeral at the Center of Cather's O Pioneers! |journal=Willa Cather Newsletter & Review |year=2016 |volume=59 |issue=1 |pages=21–26 |url=https://www.willacather.org/system/files/idxdocs/willacather_newsletter_summer_2016_final2.pdf |access-date=February 3, 2021}}

During a brief stopover in Quebec with Edith Lewis in 1927, Cather was inspired to write a novel set in that French-Canadian city. Lewis recalled: "From the first moment that she looked down from the windows of the [Chateau] Frontenac [Hotel] on the pointed roofs and Norman outlines of the town of Quebec, Willa Cather was not merely stirred and charmed—she was overwhelmed by the flood of memories, recognition, surmise it called up; by the sense of its extraordinary French character, isolated and kept intact through hundreds of years, as if by a miracle, on this great un-French continent."{{r|Woodress|pages=414–15}} Cather finished her novel Shadows on the Rock, a historical novel set in 17th-century Quebec, in 1931;{{cite journal |last1=Haller |first1=Evelyn |title="Shadows On The Rock": A Book in American English Ezra Pound Gave His Daughter That She Might Learn His Mother Tongue And More |journal=Paideuma |year=2010 |volume=37 |pages=245–265 |jstor=24726727 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/24726727 |issn=0090-5674}} it was later included in Life magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944.Canby, Henry Seidel. "The 100 Outstanding Books of 1924–1944". Life, August 14, 1944. Chosen in collaboration with the magazine's editors. The French influence is found in many other Cather works, including Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and her final, unfinished novel set in Avignon, Hard Punishments.

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| title = {{center|"On the Art of Fiction"
by Willa Cather 1920
Read by TommyMer for LibriVox}}

| description = {{center|Audio 00:04:40 ([https://cather.unl.edu/writings/nonfiction/nf062 full text])}}

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Although Cather began her writing career as a journalist, she made a distinction between journalism, which she saw as being primarily informative, and literature, which she saw as an art form.{{r|Middleton|page=27}} Cather's work is often marked by—and criticized for{{cite journal |last1=Ozieblo |first1=Barbara |title=Love and Disappointment: Gamel Woolsey's unpublished novel Patterns on the Sand |journal=Powys Notes |year=2002 |volume=14 |issue=1–2 |pages=5–12}}—its nostalgic tone{{cite journal |last1=Morgenstern |first1=Naomi E. |title=Love Is Home-Sickness": Nostalgia and Lesbian Desire in "Sapphira and the Slave Girl |journal=Novel: A Forum on Fiction |year=1996 |volume=29 |issue=2 |pages=184–205 |doi=10.2307/1345858 |jstor=1345858 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/1345858 |issn=0029-5132|url-access=subscription }}{{cite journal |last1=Morley |first1=Catherine |title=Crossing the water: Willa Cather and the transatlantic imaginary |journal=European Journal of American Culture |date=July 1, 2009 |volume=28 |issue=2 |pages=125–140 |doi=10.1386/ejac.28.2.125_1}} and themes drawn from memories of her early years on the American plains.{{cite journal |last1=Rosowski |first1=Susan J. |title=Willa Cather's Ecology of Place |journal=Western American Literature |year=1995 |volume=30 |issue=1 |pages=37–51 |doi=10.1353/wal.1995.0050|s2cid=165923896 }}{{cite journal |last1=Fischer |first1=Mike |title=Pastoralism and its Discontents: Willa Cather and the Burden of Imperialism |journal=Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature |year=1990 |volume=23 |issue=1 |pages=31–44 |jstor=24780573 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/24780573 |issn=0027-1276}} Consequently, a sense of place is integral to her work: notions of land,{{cite journal |last1=Ramirez |first1=Karen E. |title=Narrative Mappings of the Land as Space and Place in Willa Cather's O Pioneers! |journal=Great Plains Quarterly |date=Spring 2010 |volume=30 |issue=2}} the frontier,{{efn-ua|Between 1891 and Cather's publication of The Song of the Lark, there was a paucity of novels dealing with farm life. By the 1920s, however, literary interest in rural life and the frontier grew considerably.{{cite journal |last1=Dennis |first1=Ryan |title=Naming Fields: The Loss of Narrative in Farming |journal=New England Review |date=December 17, 2020 |volume=41 |issue=4 |pages=126–134 |doi=10.1353/ner.2020.0123 |s2cid=229355389 |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/775697 |language=en |issn=2161-9131|url-access=subscription }}}} pioneering and relationships with western landscapes are recurrent.{{cite news |last1=Keller |first1=Julia |title=The town Willa Cather couldn't leave behind |work=The Anniston Star |date=September 7, 2002 |page=10}}{{cite journal |last1=Walker |first1=Don D. |title=The Western Humanism of Willa Cather |journal=Western American Literature |year=1966 |volume=1 |issue=2 |pages=75–90 |doi=10.1353/wal.1966.0004 |s2cid=165885366 |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/528582/summary |language=en |issn=1948-7142|url-access=subscription }}{{cite journal |last1=Brown |first1=E. K. |title=Willa Cather and the West |journal=University of Toronto Quarterly |year=1936 |volume=5 |issue=4 |pages=544–566 |doi=10.3138/utq.5.4.544 |s2cid=161220902 |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/549805/summary |language=en |issn=1712-5278|url-access=subscription }} Even when her heroines were placed in an urban environment, the influence of place was critical, and the way that power was displayed through room layout and furniture is evident in her novels like My Mortal Enemy.{{cite book |last=Winters |first=Laura |title=Willa Cather: Landscape and Exile |location=Selinsgrove |publisher=Susquehanna University Press |year=1993| isbn=978-0-9456-3656-4| page=58}} Though she hardly confined herself to writing exclusively about the Midwest, Cather is virtually inseparable from the Midwestern identity that she actively cultivated (even though she was not a "native" Midwesterner).{{Cite web|title=Writing Willa Cather|url=https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/home/melissa-j-homestead-daryl-w-palmer-willa-cacther-review-gano|access-date=December 21, 2021|website=Cleveland Review of Books|language=en-US}} While Cather is said to have significantly altered her literary approach in each of her novels,{{cite journal |last1=Stouck |first1=David |title=Hagiographical Style in Death Comes for the Archbishop |journal=University of Toronto Quarterly |year=1972 |volume=41 |issue=4 |pages=293–307 |doi=10.3138/utq.41.4.293 |s2cid=162317290 |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/559878/summary |language=en |issn=1712-5278|url-access=subscription }}{{cite journal |last1=Curtin |first1=William M. |title=Willa Cather: Individualism and Style |journal=Colby Quarterly |year=1968 |volume=8 |issue=2 |pages=35–55}} this stance is not universal; some critics have charged Cather with being out of touch with her times and failing to use more experimental techniques in her writing, such as stream of consciousness.{{r|Middleton|page=36}}{{cite journal |last1=Homestead |first1=Melissa |last2=Reynolds |first2=Guy |editor1-last=Rosowski |editor1-first=Susan J. |title=Introduction |journal=Cather Studies |date=October 1, 2011 |volume=9 |page=x |doi=10.2307/j.ctt1df4gfg.4}}{{cite journal |last1=Skaggs |first1=Merrill Maguire |title=Willa Cather's Experimental Southern Novel |journal=The Mississippi Quarterly |year=1981 |volume=35 |issue=1 |pages=3–14 |jstor=26474933 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/26474933 |issn=0026-637X}} At the same time, others have sought to place Cather alongside modernists by either pointing to the extreme effects of her apparently simple Romanticism{{cite journal |last1=Gingrich |first1=Brian |title=Willa Cather's Naivete |journal=Twentieth-Century Literature |date=September 17, 2020 |volume=66 |issue=3 |pages=305–332 |doi=10.1215/0041462X-8646863 |s2cid=225334904 |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/764995 |language=en |issn=2325-8101|url-access=subscription }} or acknowledging her own "middle ground":

She had formed and matured her ideas on art before she wrote a novel. She had no more reason to follow Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, whose work she respected, than they did to follow her. Her style solves the problems in which she was interested. She wanted to stand midway between the journalists whose omniscient objectivity accumulate more fact than any character could notice and the psychological novelist whose use of subjective point of view stories distorts objective reality. She developed her theory on a middle ground, selecting facts from experience on the basis of feeling and then presenting the experience in a lucid, objective style.{{cite journal |last1=Curtin |first1=William M. |title=Willa Cather: Individualism and Style |journal=Colby Library Quarterly |volume=8 |issue=2 |pages=1–21 |url=https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1911&context=cq|date=June 1968}}

The English novelist A. S. Byatt has written that with each work Cather reinvented the novel form to investigate the changes in the human condition over time.{{cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/dec/09/fiction.asbyatt|title=American pastoral|date= December 8, 2006|access-date=January 23, 2014|first=A. S.|last=Byatt|author-link=A. S. Byatt|newspaper=The Guardian}} Particularly in her frontier novels, Cather wrote of both the beauty and terror of life. Like the exiled characters of Henry James, an author who had a significant influence on the author,{{cite journal |last1=Reynolds |first1=Guy |title=Willa Cather as Equivocal Icon |journal=Presentations, Talks, and Seminar Papers – Department of English |date=June 2003 |page=5 |url=https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishtalks/2}} most of Cather's major characters live as exiled immigrants,{{cite book |last1=Acocella |first1=Joan Ross |title=Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism |date=2000 |publisher=University of Nebraska Press |isbn=978-0-803-21046-2 |pages=5–6}} identifying with the immigrants' "sense of homelessness and exile" following her own feelings of exile living on the frontier. It is through their engagement with their environment that they gain their community.{{cite book |last1=Urgo |first1=Joseph R. |title=Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration |date=1995 |publisher=University of Illinois Press |isbn=978-0-252-06481-4 |pages=17, 88}} Susan J. Rosowski wrote that Cather was perhaps the first to grant immigrants a respectable position in American literature.{{cite book |last1=Rosowski |first1=Susan J. |title=The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism |date=2001 |publisher=University of Nebraska Press |isbn=978-0-803-28986-4 |page=45}}

In 1962, Willa Cather was inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame.{{Cite web|url=https://history.nebraska.gov/willa-cather-national-statuary-hall-selection-committee/|title=Willa Cather National Statuary Hall Selection Committee|website=Nebraska State Historical Society}}

In 1973, the United States Postal Service issued a postage stamp honoring her.{{Cite web|url=https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/about-us-stamps-modern-period-1940-present-commemorative-issues-1970-1979-1972-1973-0|title=American Arts Issue|website=postalmuseum.si.edu}}

In 1974, she was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners.{{Cite web|url=https://search.schlowlibrary.org/Record/85263/Description|title=Novels, 1923-1940|first=Willa|last=Cather|date=September 30, 1990|website=search.schlowlibrary.org}}

In 1986, she was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame’s Hall of Fame.{{Cite web|url=https://www.tsln.com/news/national-cowgirl-hall-of-fame-celebrates-40-years/|title=National Cowgirl Hall of Fame celebrates 40 years|first=Rhonda|last=Stearns|date=November 17, 2015|website=www.tsln.com}}{{Cite web|url=https://www.cowgirl.net/portfolios/willa-cather/|title=Willa Cather}}

In 1988, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

In 2000, she was named as one of the Virginia Women in History.{{cite web | url=https://edu.lva.virginia.gov/changemakers/va-women-2000 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240922185153/https://edu.lva.virginia.gov/changemakers/va-women-2000 | archive-date=September 22, 2024 | title=Virginia Women in History 2000 · Virginia Changemakers }}

In 2023, the U.S. state of Nebraska donated a bronze sculpture of Cather by Littleton Alston to the National Statuary Hall Collection. The statue is installed in the United States Capitol's Capitol Visitors Center, in Washington, D.C.{{Cite web|url=https://www.aoc.gov/explore-capitol-campus/art/willa-cather-statue|title=Willa Cather Statue|publisher=Architect of the Capitol|accessdate=February 20, 2023}}

{{gallery

|width=150

|height=150

|File:Will Cather bust2.jpg|A bust of Cather created in 1962 by Paul Swan for the Nebraska Hall of Fame.

|File:Willa cather us stamp 1973.jpg|A postage stamp honoring Cather, issued by the United States Postal Service in 1973.

|File:Statue of Willa carther (US capitol).webp|A statue of Cather, part of the National Statuary Hall Collection, located in the United States Capitol's Capitol Visitors Center.

|File:Cather Prairie big bluestem.jpg|Willa Cather Memorial Prairie in Webster County, Nebraska.|alt4=Green and yellow prairie grasses adorn a hill.

}}

{{notelist-ua}}

{{Reflist|30em

|refs=

{{cite book|last1=Bennett|first1=Mildred R.|title=The world of Willa Cather|date=1961|location=Lincoln|publisher=University of Nebraska Press|isbn=978-0-803-25013-0|edition=New with notes and index}}

{{cite book|last=Homestead|first=Melissa J.|title=The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis|date=2021|location=Oxford|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19065-287-6}}

{{cite book|last=Lewis|first=Edith|title=Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record|date=2000|location=Lincoln|publisher=University of Nebraska Press|isbn=978-0-80327-996-4}}

{{cite book|last=Lee|first=Hermione|title=Willa Cather: Double Lives|date=1990|location=New York|publisher=Pantheon Books|isbn=978-0-39453-703-0|url=https://archive.org/details/willacatherdoubl00leeh}}

{{cite book|last=Woodress|first=James|title=Willa Cather: A Literary Life|date=1987|location=Lincoln|publisher=University of Nebraska Press|isbn=978-0-80324-734-5|url=https://archive.org/details/willacatherliter00wood}}

{{cite book |last1=Middleton |first1=Jo Ann |title=Willa Cather's Modernism: A Study of Style and Technique|date=1990|location=Rutherford|publisher=Fairleigh Dickinson University Press|isbn=978-0-83863-385-4}}

}}

{{Sister project links|auto=no |b=no |c= |n=no |q= |s= |v=no |wikt=no }}

• [https://www.willacather.org/willa-cather-review Willa Cather Review] at the [https://www.willacather.org/ Willa Cather Foundation]
• [https://www.willacather.org/learn/collections/explore-collection Special Collections & Archives] at The National Willa Cather Center
• [http://cather.unl.edu Willa Cather Archive] at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• {{usurped|1=[https://web.archive.org/web/20061202042523/http://www.nebraskahistory.org/lib-arch/research/manuscripts/family/cather.htm Willa Cather Collection]}} at the Nebraska State Historical Society
• [https://www.drew.edu/library/2019/06/28/the-willa-cather-collection/ Willa Cather Collection] at Drew University
• [https://mms.newberry.org/xml/xml_files/CatherW.xml Willa Cather–Irene Miner Weisz Papers] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210429102302/https://mms.newberry.org/xml/xml_files/CatherW.xml |date=April 29, 2021 }} at the Newberry Library
• [https://mms.newberry.org/xml/xml_files/HitzCather.xml Benjamin D. Hitz–Willa Cather Papers] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210506035439/https://mms.newberry.org/xml/xml_files/HitzCather.xml |date=May 6, 2021 }} at the Newberry Library
• [https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/3/resources/1373 Ann Safford Mandel collection of Willa Cather papers] at the Mortimer Rare Book Collection

• {{StandardEbooks|Standard Ebooks URL=https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/willa-cather}}
• {{Gutenberg author | id=22 }}
• {{FadedPage|id=Cather, Willa|name=Willa Cather|author=yes}}
• {{Internet Archive author |sname=Willa Sibert Cather}}
• {{Librivox author |id=581}}
• [http://theotherpages.org/poems/poem-cd.html#cather Willa Cather] at Poets' Corner

{{Cather}}

{{PulitzerPrize Fiction 1918–1925}}

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{{Virginia Women in History}}

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Cather, Willa}}

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