Willa Cather

Born in Virginia in 1873, Willa Cather moved to Nebraska as a child, and that landscape shaped much of her best-known writing. She studied at the University of Nebraska, worked in journalism and editing, and later devoted herself fully to fiction.

She is especially known for novels such as O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia, all of which helped define her reputation as a writer of the Great Plains and of immigrant life in America. In 1923, she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours.

Cather spent much of her later life in New York, but her work kept returning to the people and places of her early years. She died in 1947, and her novels remain admired for their emotional clarity, strong sense of place, and lasting picture of American life.