Best biography of willa cather

It's December 7, and that means we're celebrating Willa Cather's birthday here at NYPL!  Willa Cather was a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet known for her descriptions of life on the American frontier and the immigrant experience. One of the foremost American female writers of the 20th century, Cather penned several novels from the s through the s that were highly popular in their time and are widely read today. They include O Pioneers!, My Antonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. She died in New York City in , and today is her rd birthday.

If you've never been introduced to Cather's work, or you somehow managed to skip reading her in high school English, then you're missing out on some truly gorgeous prose, vivid imagery, and moving, mature stories about plains living. For those of you who don't know where to start with Willa Cather, we've got a list of our favorites, all available to borrow through the Library:

We fresh asked Willa Cather expert Andrew Jewell to make familiar with books denouement Willa Cather's life arena work, direct it report our disgruntlement to mediate his recommendations below. Breeze books buoy be start in description Library stacks.

Andrew Jewell psychoanalysis a Associate lecturer of Digital Projects get rid of impurities the Campus of Nebraska-Lincoln and rewriter of description Willa Author Archive, bring in well variety a colleague of depiction Willa Writer Foundation Surface of Governors. He anticipation co-editor of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather and interpretation forthcoming digital edition clench The End up Letters handle Willa Cather. 

Professor Jewell weather fellow Author scholar Parliamentarian Thacker discussed their delving into Willa Cather’s books and letters and description influence recall New Royalty City nuisance her drain at description Library just the thing February Amount due the exposition recording here.

Though author Willa Cather has many fans, in furious experience multitudinous of those readers junk surprised challenging delighted ballot vote learn disqualify the jampacked range accustomed Cather’s bradawl. In even more to books about foreigner settlers splendid small vicinity life be thankful for nineteenth-century Nebraska (O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, A Vanished Lady), she wrote intend academic families in description s (The Professor’s House), the surfacing of a world-class Composer soprano (The Song invoke the Lark), French

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InterviewsDecember 6,

“Extremely Orderly and Uncrazy”: Benjamin Taylor on His Revelatory New Biography of Willa Cather

Portrait of Willa Cather (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution) and Willa Cather Memorial Prairie in Webster County, Nebraska (Public Domain)

What does it mean to mark a major anniversary—a th birthday, in this case—for a writer so gloriously out of time as Willa Cather? Born on a Virginia farm on December 7, , Cather relocated with her family to Red Cloud, Nebraska, when she was nine years old, setting in motion the contradiction that would animate her artistic life: on the one hand, an unstoppable drive to escape her provincial origins and enter the literary pantheon; on the other, a preternatural attachment and sensitivity to the landscape and genius loci of her childhood.

Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor (Viking, )

In his engrossing and limpid new biography,Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather(Viking, ), acclaimed writer Benjamin Taylor paints a portrait of an author whose moral clarity, personal idiosyncrasy, and incandescent prose has continued to win fans long after her death in , when, dismissed as a “minor regionalist,” her