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PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING FRONTIER NOVELIST Willa Cather (1873 – 1947)

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PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING FRONTIER NOVELIST Willa Cather (1873 – 1947) IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF OUR “COUSINS” … PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING FRONTIER NOVELIST Willa Cather (1873 – 1947) — Bradley Rymph Willa Sibert Cather was an early 20th century novel, One of Ours (1922) American writer, best known for her novels won Cather a Pulitzer Prize in 1923. about life on the Great Plains as white settlers began their moves there in the late 1800s Cather’s writings, however, were not limited from the eastern United States and as to the Great Plains. Another of her immigrants from Europe. Three of her most masterpieces, Death Comes for the widely read novels were her Prairie Trilogy — Archbishop (1927), was set in New Mexico O Pioneers! (published in 1913), The Song of and France. She also wrote about life in New the Lark (1915), and My Antonia (1918) — all York City, where she worked as a writer and written about families after they had settled in editor for most of her adult life. And her final frontier Nebraska. Another Nebraska-based novel, the controversial Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), took place in the Back Visits to Back Creek Valley (Gore), Virginia Creek Valley of northwestern Virginia, the Appalachian area where she was born north October 17, 2010 of the city of Winchester. That novel’s final October 9, 2011 (with Albert James Rymph and Edna Mae Rymph) chapters were set at Willow Shade, the house in Back Creek Valley where she and her family lived from shortly after her birth until Text © 2011 by Bradley B. Rymph “IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF OUR ANCESTORS …” HOME PAGE: http://www.bradleyrymph.com “Willow Shade,” Gore, Virginia they moved west to Nebraska in 1883 (when Willa’s maternal grandparents. A few months she was age 9). later, Willa’s paternal grandparents — William A. and Emily Ann (Smith) Cather — One of Willa Cather’s great-great- moved west from Back Creek Valley to the grandfathers was Captain Jeremiah Smith Nebraska frontier, and Willa’s parents moved (1711–1787; see separate profile in their family into the Cather grandparents’ “Soldiers”), who had been one of the earliest home, known as Willow Shade. Both houses settlers in Back Creek Valley. still stand and are listed on the National Willa Cather was born December 7, 1873, Register of Historic Places. with the name Willela Cather. Her parents In 1883, Willa’s parents decided to move had a sheep farm in Back Creek Valley. At the west to join her maternal grandparents on time of her birth, her parents lived in a house the Nebraska frontier. They eventually settled in the Valley that had been built in the early in railroad community of Red Cloud, in the 1800s, then expanded and remodeled by Cather home, Red Cloud, Nebraska south-central portion of the state, and the English Classics aloud to her two Willa’s father opened a farm mortgage grandmothers and learned to read Latin at business there. Most of the family’s the same time,” according to Edith Lewis neighbors were European immigrants. (with whom Cather lived for the last several decades of her life). Many years later, she recalled the family’s arrival in Red Cloud: The writer Joan Acocella wrote of Willa’s childhood: “No money, no privacy, no great We drove out to Red Cloud to my things around her, but just a dusty prairie grandfather’s homestead one day in April. town … a mother usually sick or pregnant, I was sitting on the hay in the bottom of a and a pack of noisy little brothers and Studebaker wagon, holding onto the side sisters.” of the wagon to steady myself — the roads were mostly faint rails over the As a child, Willa was known as an bunch grass in those days. The land was unconventional girl. Acocella calls her “a open range and there was almost no show-off, an explosion, a pest.” Willa fencing. As we drove further and further intentionally sought out the eccentric older out in the country I felt a good deal as if people around Red Cloud, hoping to learn we had come to the end of everything…. from them less conventional ways of thinking It was kind of an erasure of personality…. and acting. Hoping to one day become a I had heard my father say you had to doctor, she had a hobby of dissecting animals show grit in a new country, and I would have bot on pretty well doing that ride if it had not been for the larks. Every now and then one flew up and sang a few splendid notes and dropped down into the grass again. That reminded me of something — I don’t know what, but my one purpose in life just then was not to cry, and every time they did it, I thought I would go under. Both in Virginia and in her first two years in Nebraska, Willa was not sent to school. Instead her education in Virginia consisted of her being read to by her maternal grandmother. In Nebraska, “she read many of The young Willa Cather, dressed as a boy WILLAWILLA CATHER CATHER AND AND MARK MARK TWAIN TWAIN In late 1905, Willa Cather attended a 70th good fellow, but impossible as a man of birthday celebration for Mark Twain. A letters. decade earlier in May 1895, about the time she would have graduated from the Just two years later, Cather’s opinion of University of Nebraska, Cather had written Twain seems to have moderated. In May a scathing critique of Twain in the 1897, she wrote in The Home Monthly: Nebraska State Journal: I got a letter last week from a little boy … like all men of his class, and limited just half-past seven who had just read mentality, he cannot criticize without “huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer.” becoming personal and insulting. He He said: “If there are any more books cannot be scathing without being a like them in the world, send them to blackguard…. Mark Twain is a humorist of me quick.” I had to humbly confess to a kind. His humor is always rather broad, him that if there were any others I had so broad that the polite world can justly not the good fortune to know of them. call it coarse. He is not a reader nor a What a red-letter day it is to a boy, the rhinker nor a man who loves art of any day he first opens “Tom Sawyer.” I kind. He is a clever Yankee who has made would rather sail on the raft down the a “good thing” out of writing. … but he is Missouri again with “Huck” Finn and not and never will be a part of literature. Jim than go down the Nile in December The association and companionship of of see Venice from a gondola in May. cultured men has given Mark Twain a Certainly Mark Twain is much better sort of professional veneer, but it could when he writes of his Missouri boys not give him fine instincts or nice than when he makes sickley romances discriminations or elevated tastes. His about Joan of Arc. And certainly he works are pure and suitable for children, never did a better piece of work than just as the work of most shallow and me- “Prince and Pauper.” One seems to get diocre fellows…. Thoroughly likeable as a at the very heart of old England in that dearest of children’s books, and in its pages the frail boy king, and his gloomy sister Mary who in her day wrought so much woe for unhappy England, and the dashing Princess Elizabeth who lived to rule so well, seem to live again. Willa Cather’s table at a party for Mark Twain’s 70th birthday in 1905. Cather is third from right. HOW WE’RE RELATED: Willa Cather Jeremiah Smith = Mary Elizabeth _________ ◄◄◄◄◄ (1711 – 9/4/1787) = (1732 – ?) ▼ ▼ ▼ Jeremiah Smith = Elizabeth Ann Snyder George Smith = Ann Ellis (1758 – 10/8/1794) = (1753 – bef. 9/7/1796) (11/2/1769 – 10/1/1844) = (6/23/1788 – 5/28/1871) ▼ ▼ Samuel Albin = Sarah Smith William A. Cather = Emily Ann Smith (1/12/1785 – 10/30/1844) = (2/14/1785 – 2/16/1845) (5/23/1823 – 11/23/1887) = (9/10/1827 – 2/23/1900) ▼ ▼ Samuel Myers = Sarah Albin Charles Fetique Cather = Mary Virginia Boak (9/26/1818 – 7/14/1902) = (3/5/1819 – 3/7/1894) (1848 – 3/19/28) = (1850 – 1931) ▼ ▼ = Harriet Myers Willa Sibert Cather (4/14/1858 – 4/26/1944) = (4/22/1858 – 7/20/1930) (12/7/1873 – 4/24/1947) ▼ = Ethel Catherine Bradley (4/8/1891 – 1/28/1979) = (7/14/1891 – 7/22/1973) ▼ Albert James Rymph = Edna Mae Heath (11/9/1925 – 2/16/2019) = (living) ▼ Bradley Budd Rymph = José Verzosa Baquiran III (living) = (living) to learn their anatomies. Willa also preferred Cloud, she began writing play reviews, the company and activities of boys to those features, and a column for the Nebraska of girls. According to profiler Chris Kraus, “At State Journal. fourteen, she went to the town barber, got a crew cut, and started dressing like a man.” Also while in college, Willa is said to have fallen passionately in love with a fellow When Willa first arrived at the University of student and athlete, Louise Pound. One Nebraska in 1890, she continued to dress as a profiler notes,“ In her letters to Pound, man — a practice she continued until friends Cather regrets the fact that society considers persuaded her to stop during her second year intimate friendship between women to be in Lincoln.
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