Her most famous books, including O Pioneers (1913) and My Antonia, explored themes of farming, family life, and community in her home state of Nebraska. Though she grew up in a time when it was sometimes hard for women to become successful writers, Willa Cather became one of America’s best novelists. She worked as an editor at McClure’s magazine and became a professional writer. In 1906, she moved to New York and began to write articles and stories for a living. She went to college at the University of Nebraska to become a scientist but instead decided to become a writer.Īfter graduation (1895), she moved to Pennsylvania where she taught English and Latin at a high school while writing short stories on the side. Her work centered on pioneer life in the Nebraska prairies and southwestern deserts.Īs a child, Willa Cather moved with her family from Virginia to Nebraska, first to a farm and then to the small town of Red Cloud. Paperback (September 25th, 2017): $18.Willa Cather was a Pulitzer prize winning novelist and short story writer.Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform Cather learned of his death while reading the newspaper in a hair salon. Grosvenor was killed in 1918 in Cantigny, France. It was just to escape from him and his kind that I wrote at all.

I had no more thought of writing a story about him than of writing about my own nose. On those long rides on the wheat, we talked for the first time in years, and I saw some of the things that were really in the back of his mind. We spent the first week hauling wheat to town. I was staying on his father's farm when the war broke out. He could never escape from the misery of being himself, except in action, and whatever he put his hand to turned out either ugly or ridiculous. Cather explained in a letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher: We were very much alike, and very different. Cather) was born and raised on the farm that adjoined her own family's, and she combined parts of her own personality with Grosvenor's in the character of Claude. Nevertheless, Wheeler views himself as a victim of his father's success and his own inexplicable malaise.Cather's cousin Grosvenor (G.P. The son of a successful farmer and an intensely pious mother, he is guaranteed a comfortable livelihood. It tells the story of the life of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska native around the turn of the 20th century. One of Ours is a novel by Willa Cather that won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel.

Willa cather pulitzer prize book