Willa Cather

(1873 - 1947)

Born in Virginia in 1873, Willa Cather at the age of nine moved with her family to Nebraska, where she lived among immigrants settling the Great Plains. She graduated from the state’s university in 1895 and became the managing editor of McClure’s Magazine in New York City in 1905, serving until 1912. Cather published O Pioneers!, her second novel, in 1913. She later remarked that “all my stories have been written with material that was gathered—no, God save us! not gathered but absorbed—before I was fifteen years old.”