Willa Cather
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50 free Willa Cather trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Willa Cather turned the Nebraska prairie into one of the great landscapes of American fiction. She arrived there as a child from Virginia, grew up in the small town of Red Cloud, and spent the rest of her life writing about the immigrant farmers, railroad towns and restless young people she had known, even after she had settled in New York. This quiz covers the novels readers meet first, My Ántonia, O Pioneers!, A Lost Lady, The Professor's House, Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock, along with the short stories, the prizes and the friendships behind them. There is also a run of questions on the houses she lived in, including the childhood home in Red Cloud that visitors can still tour. It is written for book clubs, students and anyone planning a trip to Cather country. The opening questions are the most approachable, and later ones reward readers who know the less famous books. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you leave with a few facts worth repeating.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Willa Cather novel, about Nebraska farm boy Claude Wheeler going to war in France, won her the Pulitzer Prize?
One of Ours
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.
Q 02What did Willa Cather's will forbid anyone to publish, a ban that held until 2013?
Her letters
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.
Q 03Which 1925 Jazz Age novel borrowed so much from Willa Cather's A Lost Lady that its author wrote to apologize?
The Great Gatsby
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.
Q 04Which man's name did the young Willa Cather briefly sign instead of her own while growing up in Red Cloud?
William
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.
Q 05Which nineteenth-century American poet wrote the verse that gave Willa Cather the title of her novel O Pioneers!?
Walt Whitman
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.
Q 06In which part of the family's small Red Cloud house, now a museum, did young Willa Cather have her bedroom?
The attic
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.
Q 07Which novelist sneered in 1923 that Willa Cather had lifted her prize-winning battle scenes from The Birth of a Nation?
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway made the jibe in private, and even Cather's close friend Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant felt the novel betrayed the realities of war.
Q 08In My Ántonia, which dangerous creature does the young narrator kill, earning the admiration of Ántonia Shimerda?
A rattlesnake
A rattlesnake, and a long one, falls to a shovel the two children had been sent to fetch for Ántonia's older brother Ambrosch.
Q 09Willa Cather's Greenwich Village apartment at 5 Bank Street was demolished in 1927 to make way for what?
A subway line
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.
Q 10Which orphaned Virginia boy, sent to live with his grandparents in Nebraska, narrates Willa Cather's My Ántonia?
Jim Burden
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.
Q 11From which Central European homeland, now part of the Czech Republic, does the Shimerda family in My Ántonia emigrate?
Bohemia
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.
Q 12In which New England state, far from her Nebraska prairies, is Willa Cather buried in the town of Jaffrey?
New Hampshire
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.
Q 13Which magazine editor shared Willa Cather's home for 39 years and is buried beside her?
Edith Lewis
Q 21Which older New England writer, to whom O Pioneers! is dedicated, urged Willa Cather to write about her own country?
Sarah Orne Jewett
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.
Q 22Which young publishing house won Willa Cather in 1920, after her old firm spent just $300 advertising My Ántonia?
Alfred A. Knopf
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.
Q 23Which American religious leader was exposed in a magazine series that Willa Cather largely wrote without credit?
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.
Q 14To which Pennsylvania city did Willa Cather move in 1896, working there for a decade as a journalist and schoolteacher?
Pittsburgh
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.
Q 15Which muckraking New York magazine hired Willa Cather as an editor in 1906 and later serialized her first novel?
McClure's
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.
Q 16Thea Kronborg, a small-town Colorado girl in a 1915 Willa Cather novel, leaves for Chicago and becomes what?
An opera singer
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.
Q 17Where do two French priests build a Catholic diocese in Willa Cather's novel Death Comes for the Archbishop?
New Mexico
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.
Q 18Which French colonial city, seen through an apothecary's daughter, is the setting of Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock?
Quebec
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.
Q 19In O Pioneers!, which daughter inherits her dying father's Nebraska farm and turns it into a prosperous enterprise?
Alexandra Bergson
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.
Q 20Under which fictional name does Willa Cather's hometown of Red Cloud appear as the prairie town in My Ántonia?
Black Hawk
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.
Mary Baker Eddy
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.
Q 24On which Bay of Fundy island did Willa Cather keep a summer cottage with neither plumbing nor electricity?
Grand Manan
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.
Q 25Which future general taught Willa Cather mathematics at university and, like her, later won a Pulitzer Prize?
John J. Pershing
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.
Q 26Which Hollywood star played Marian Forrester in the 1934 film of A Lost Lady, an adaptation Willa Cather disliked?
Barbara Stanwyck
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.
Q 27Which real frontier scout and Indian fighter appears as a character in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop?
Kit Carson
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.
Q 28Which novel, Willa Cather's last, returns to the Virginia where she was born?
Sapphira and the Slave Girl
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.
Q 29Which 1912 debut novel by Willa Cather follows a celebrated Bostonian torn between his wife and a London actress?
Alexander's Bridge
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.
Q 30Willa Cather's first book, April Twilights, appeared in 1903 and contained what kind of writing?
Poetry
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.