Q 01/05

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

A) A Lost Lady

B) One of Ours

C) The Professor's House

D) My Mortal Enemy

Answer · why

B) 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 sitt...

Q 02/05

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

A) Her letters

B) Her diaries

C) Her early poems

D) Her school essays

Answer · why

A) 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 03/05

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

A) An American Tragedy

B) Manhattan Transfer

C) Arrowsmith

D) The Great Gatsby

Answer · why

D) 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 p...

Q 04/05

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

A) Walter

B) William

C) Wilbur

D) Charles

Answer · why

B) 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 05/05

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

A) Emily Dickinson

B) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

C) Walt Whitman

D) Ralph Waldo Emerson

Answer · why

C) 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 p...