I found this 2005 PBS documentary on Willa Cather, subtitled The Road is All, after a line by Walt Whitman, profoundly plodding and stodgy - especially regarding Cather's personal life - but it draws insightful parallels between her life and her books, and as such will be a useful resource for anyone interested in her novels.
The introduction to Cather's Song of the Lark by Doris Grumbach provides a far more vivid portrayal of Cather as a person. Her selected letters also offer insights into a sharp personality with a keen eye for observation, although that book suffers from the lack of letters from her close friends, Isabelle McClung and Edith Lewis, which were destroyed at Cather's request.
The movie dances around the issue of Cather's love life - she travelled extensively with McClung before the latter got married and then lived with Lewis for 39 years, but scholars go on the record in the movie that there is nothing in her books that suggests she ever knew real physical passion, as if novelists at the beginning of the twentieth century were ever going to write that sort of books. It is almost as if the filmmakers, back in 2006, felt that they had to play down that aspect of Cather for their movie to be watched. The other thing that bothered me about the movie was the use of actors to reenact scenes of life on the Nebraskan frontier a century ago. I would have preferred being shown real artifacts of the time.
Again, the documentary doesn't provide much help to understand Cather as a person, but it offers a stellar introduction to her novels and how she found inspiration in her real life, so it remains a valuable watch in spite of its shortcomings, and PBS also designed a good companion website about Cather.
While life on the frontier (Nebraska, in her case) was the transformative experience of Cather's life, she was born in Virginia in 1873 and only moved to Nebraska ten years later. She later used that turning point as the setting of her novel My Antonia. As a teen in the late 1880s, Cather often dressed like a man, which people have interpreted to mean that she wanted the same success as men. Later, she seemed to sense that she could not have the career she wanted if she married, although her selected letters suggest she had a moderate interest in men. She attended the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in the early 1890s, where she planned to major in science until one of her teachers published an essay she had written in the school newspaper. On the staff of that newspaper, Cather earned the reputation as a fearsome critic of theater, in spite of her lack of experience. She was very ambitious and eager to get out of Nebraska, and in 1896 took a job in Pittsburgh - a wealthy city in those days - editing a women's magazine.
Pittsburgh is where she met Isabelle McClung. They traveled to Europe in 1902. One year later, a collection of Cather's poems was published, and then in 1905 a collection of short stories by McClure, who offered her a job at his magazine - a leading light for top fiction and groundbreaking journalism. Cather spent 6 years there. The job served as her apprenticeship to the world of publishing. She did feel trapped by the editing job and wanted to write a novel.
She published her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, in 1912 at age 38. It was not a success. Characters were abstract and there was none of the later signature themes of Cather's. (It took place in the high society). A friend, Sarah Orne Jewett, advised her to find her quiet center and write from there. In 1912 Cather traveled back to Nebraska and then Arizona and New Mexico, on a leave of absence. (The movie never mentions Cather was a teacher in Pittsburgh for some time, having wanted to return to the city where McClung lived.)
Back in New York City, Cather jumped into the unknown, working for herself only, and wrote novels that drew from her direct experience. While Cather continued her friendship with McClung (Song of the Lark is dedicated to her), she moved in with Edith Lewis in 1912 in Greenwich Village. This was the most productive period of her life. She published O Pioneers in 1913 (the title is drawn from a poem by Walt Whitman) and followed it with Song of the Lark (1915), inspired by her friend the Wagnerian opera singer Olive Fremstad. McClung married a concert violinist in 1916.
Cather then wrote My Antonia, which has the particularity of being told through a male character's eyes. The father of the main character commits suicide, in an incident that echoes the real-life suicide of the father of someone Cather knew. As another example of Cather drawing from her life for her fiction, Cather's cousin was killed in World War I and her novel One of Ours, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, tells the life of a young Nebraskan farmer who enlists to fight in the Great War. In spite of the literary accolades, Cather considered the book a failure. She had no first-hand knowledge of the 1918 French battlefield and today's critics agree it showed.
Her next book, The Professor's House, describes what happens when what gave your life meaning is over long before your actual life is. This is followed by Death Comes for the Archbishop. By the 1930s Cather had become a literary phenomenon. She appeared on the cover of TIME magazine and was named one of the 12 greatest women in America by Good Housekeeping Magazine but increasingly valued her privacy. Her parents, favorite brother, McClung died (the latter two in 1938). Cather's health steadily deterioriated and she died in April 1947 in New York City.
For more information on Cather, the website of the Willa Cather Archive at the University of Nebraska Lincoln offers a longer biographical sketch.
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