50 Fun Facts About Willa Cather

Which Willa Cather novel, about Nebraska farm boy Claude Wheeler going to war in France, won her the Pulitzer Prize?

One of Ours drew on the life of Cather's cousin G. P. Cather, who was killed at Cantigny in 1918. She learned of his death from a newspaper while sitting in a hair salon.

What did Willa Cather's will forbid anyone to publish, a ban that held until 2013?

Her letters stayed off limits until 2013, when 566 of them were published, two years after the death of her nephew and second literary executor.

Which 1925 Jazz Age novel borrowed so much from Willa Cather's A Lost Lady that its author wrote to apologize?

The Great Gatsby owes part of Daisy Buchanan to Cather's Marian Forrester, and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to Cather apologizing for any unintentional plagiarism.

Which man's name did the young Willa Cather briefly sign instead of her own while growing up in Red Cloud?

William was her signature for a short while, in the years when she went on house calls with the town's physician and planned to become a surgeon.

Which nineteenth-century American poet wrote the verse that gave Willa Cather the title of her novel O Pioneers!?

Walt Whitman included the piece in Leaves of Grass. Cather's novel was her second, and the first she set among the immigrant farmers of the Nebraska prairie.

In which part of the family's small Red Cloud house, now a museum, did young Willa Cather have her bedroom?

The attic was reached by a narrow stair from the kitchen, and Cather slept up there with her brothers and sisters until she left for university in Lincoln.

Which novelist sneered in 1923 that Willa Cather had lifted her prize-winning battle scenes from The Birth of a Nation?

Ernest Hemingway made the jibe in private, and even Cather's close friend Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant felt the novel betrayed the realities of war.

In My Ántonia, which dangerous creature does the young narrator kill, earning the admiration of Ántonia Shimerda?

A rattlesnake, and a long one, falls to a shovel the two children had been sent to fetch for Ántonia's older brother Ambrosch.

Willa Cather's Greenwich Village apartment at 5 Bank Street was demolished in 1927 to make way for what?

A subway line under construction ended her long stay at Bank Street, and Cather put her belongings in storage. She later moved uptown to Park Avenue, where she died in 1947.

Which orphaned Virginia boy, sent to live with his grandparents in Nebraska, narrates Willa Cather's My Ántonia?

Jim Burden goes on to Harvard and becomes an attorney for a western railroad, but he keeps returning in memory to the immigrant girl he knew as a boy.

From which Central European homeland, now part of the Czech Republic, does the Shimerda family in My Ántonia emigrate?

Bohemia is where Mr. Shimerda left a skilled trade, a home and his friends, and his longing for it ends in tragedy during the family's first Nebraska winter.

In which New England state, far from her Nebraska prairies, is Willa Cather buried in the town of Jaffrey?

New Hampshire was a retreat for Cather, who first came to Jaffrey to join friends at the Shattuck Inn. She lies in the town's Old Burying Ground.

Which magazine editor shared Willa Cather's home for 39 years and is buried beside her?

Edith Lewis also worked as an advertising copywriter at J. Walter Thompson, served as executor of Cather's literary estate, and published a memoir of her in 1953.

To which Pennsylvania city did Willa Cather move in 1896, working there for a decade as a journalist and schoolteacher?

Pittsburgh gave her a job on a women's magazine called Home Monthly, then a critic's desk at the Leader, and finally a high school English department to run.

Which muckraking New York magazine hired Willa Cather as an editor in 1906 and later serialized her first novel?

McClure's got one more service from her: she ghost-wrote the autobiography of its founder, S. S. McClure, which the magazine serialized after he was ousted.

Thea Kronborg, a small-town Colorado girl in a 1915 Willa Cather novel, leaves for Chicago and becomes what?

An opera singer was a life Cather knew at close range: her friend Olive Fremstad, a Wagnerian soprano at the Metropolitan, was the model for Thea.

Where do two French priests build a Catholic diocese in Willa Cather's novel Death Comes for the Archbishop?

New Mexico had only just passed into American hands when the story opens, and its bishop is modeled on Jean-Baptiste Lamy, who built the cathedral in Santa Fe.

Which French colonial city, seen through an apothecary's daughter, is the setting of Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock?

Quebec overwhelmed Cather on her first brief stopover there, and the novel she set in the city in 1697 became one of the best-selling American novels of 1931.

In O Pioneers!, which daughter inherits her dying father's Nebraska farm and turns it into a prosperous enterprise?

Alexandra Bergson talks her brothers into mortgaging the homestead to buy more land while the neighbors are selling up, and by the novel's second part the farm is thriving.

Under which fictional name does Willa Cather's hometown of Red Cloud appear as the prairie town in My Ántonia?

Black Hawk is one of a variety of names under which Red Cloud turns up in her fiction, and the house of the Harling family is a real one that visitors can still see.

Which older New England writer, to whom O Pioneers! is dedicated, urged Willa Cather to write about her own country?

Sarah Orne Jewett, the Maine author of The Country of the Pointed Firs, became her friend and mentor, a rare exception among women writers Cather mostly judged too sentimental.

Which young publishing house won Willa Cather in 1920, after her old firm spent just $300 advertising My Ántonia?

Alfred A. Knopf had been founded only five years earlier and was known for backing its authors with advertising. The publisher came to call Cather his own favorite.

Which American religious leader was exposed in a magazine series that Willa Cather largely wrote without credit?

Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, was profiled in fourteen parts credited to Georgine Milmine. The church's own archives later showed Cather wrote all but the first.

On which Bay of Fundy island did Willa Cather keep a summer cottage with neither plumbing nor electricity?

Grand Manan, in New Brunswick, gave her seclusion from 1922. Anyone wanting to reach her had to write or telegraph, and she finished her last novel there in 1940.

Which future general taught Willa Cather mathematics at university and, like her, later won a Pulitzer Prize?

John J. Pershing was posted to the University of Nebraska as its professor of military science from 1891 to 1895. His memoirs of the World War won the 1932 Pulitzer for history.

Which Hollywood star played Marian Forrester in the 1934 film of A Lost Lady, an adaptation Willa Cather disliked?

Barbara Stanwyck's version bore little resemblance to the book, and the disappointed Cather later made a will that banned any dramatization of her works.

Which real frontier scout and Indian fighter appears as a character in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop?

Kit Carson gets no hero's treatment: the dying bishop remembers the removal of the Navajo, which the scout carried out, as a great wrong.

Which novel, Willa Cather's last, returns to the Virginia where she was born?

Sapphira and the Slave Girl ends with Nancy's escape to Canada by the Underground Railroad, and its epilogue is narrated by a child who stands for Cather herself.

Which 1912 debut novel by Willa Cather follows a celebrated Bostonian torn between his wife and a London actress?

Alexander's Bridge won favorable reviews, but Cather soon judged it weak and shallow, and she turned to the Nebraska prairie for her next book.

Willa Cather's first book, April Twilights, appeared in 1903 and contained what kind of writing?

Poetry came first for the future novelist. Her first story collection followed in 1905, and her first novel did not appear until 1912, when she was 38.

Which 1905 collection, Willa Cather's first book of short stories, includes A Wagner Matinee and The Sculptor's Funeral?

The Troll Garden holds seven stories, and Cather thought enough of four of them to revise them for a later collection in 1920.

Which Willa Cather story follows a restless teenager who steals money and escapes to a luxurious New York hotel?

Paul's Case, first printed in 1905 with the subtitle A Study in Temperament, was for many years the only story Cather allowed to be anthologized.

In The Professor's House, which brilliant student discovers an ancient cliff city and later dies in the Great War?

Tom Outland also leaves behind an invention, the Outland vacuum, and the fortune it earns goes to the professor's elder daughter, who had been engaged to him.

Which Willa Cather novel takes its title from a Jules Breton painting that hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago?

The Song of the Lark shows a peasant girl in a field, transfixed by birdsong at dawn. The 1884 canvas was also used as the cover art of the novel.

From which Scandinavian country did the immigrant farm family at the heart of O Pioneers! come to Nebraska?

Sweden colors the whole book: the heroine keeps three young Swedish girls working in her kitchen and remembers her father singing in a male chorus in Stockholm.

Which instrument did Ántonia's homesick father, Mr. Shimerda, play with his friends in the old country in My Ántonia?

The violin belongs to the life he never wanted to leave, and he takes his own life before the family's first winter on the prairie is over.

Which hired girl in My Ántonia becomes a successful Lincoln dressmaker and distracts the narrator from his studies?

Lena Lingard gives her name to the third of the novel's five books, and she and the narrator go to plays together until a teacher steers him away to Harvard.

In which Washington building did Nebraska install a bronze statue of Willa Cather in 2023, representing the state?

The U.S. Capitol holds the National Statuary Hall Collection, where Littleton Alston's bronze of Cather replaced a statue of J. Sterling Morton donated in 1937.

Willa Cather was born in 1873 in a Virginia log farmhouse that belonged to which member of her family?

Her grandmother Rachel Boak owned the house, which Cather's great-grandfather had built. The family left it for a brick home called Willow Shade within about a year.

What did the young Willa Cather reportedly take as pay for working at Dr. Cook's drugstore in Red Cloud?

Wallpaper covered in roses was her wage, and she is believed to have hung it in her own bedroom, where the same paper can still be seen.

The Cather family name is said to derive from Cadair Idris, a mountain in which part of the British Isles?

Wales is where her father's family originated. Cadair Idris stands in Gwynedd, a long way from the Virginia farm where Cather was born.

Which French city was the setting of Willa Cather's unfinished novel, destroyed on her instructions after her death?

Avignon in the Middle Ages was the world of Hard Punishments. Her partner destroyed almost all of the manuscript as Cather wished, and only fragments survive.

Besides English, which language did Willa Cather teach during her years as a Pennsylvania high school teacher?

Latin sat beside algebra and English composition in her first year of teaching, and at Allegheny High School she rose to head the English department.

Which childhood friend of Willa Cather, a hired girl in Red Cloud, was the real model for the heroine of My Ántonia?

Annie Pavelka raised a large family on a Webster County farm that is now a historic site, and Cather sent her money during the Depression years.

Red Cloud, Willa Cather's Nebraska hometown, is named after a celebrated war leader of which Native American people?

Lakota warriors under Red Cloud beat the US Army in the war that bears his name. The town named for him was voted county seat in 1871, twelve years before the Cathers arrived.

An essay on which Scottish writer, printed without her knowledge, launched Willa Cather as a student journalist?

Thomas Carlyle got her into the Nebraska State Journal, and she was soon writing columns for it at a dollar apiece, hooked by the sight of her words in print.

Which Willa Cather story describes a room that visitors can still see at the back of her childhood home in Red Cloud?

Old Mrs. Harris appeared in Obscure Destinies in 1932, and the family's house, now a National Historic Landmark, is furnished so the old woman's room matches the story.

Which disease, then rampant in Virginia, helped persuade Willa Cather's family to move west to Nebraska in 1883?

Tuberculosis was one push and Nebraska farmland the pull, yet her father gave up farming after eighteen months and opened a real estate business in Red Cloud.

Under which kind of tree are the lovers Emil and Marie shot by her jealous husband in O Pioneers!?

A white mulberry gives its name to the fourth part of the novel. Marie's husband Frank fires in a drunken rage, flees to Omaha and later turns himself in.

By the final book of My Ántonia, the heroine has married which Nebraska farmer, the father of her many children?

Anton Cuzak gives the closing section its title, Cuzak's Boys, and her old friend plans to take the couple's sons on a hunting trip the following year.