By Christopher B. Daly
Born on Dec. 7, 1873, during Reconstruction, Willa Cather lived until after World War II, spanning parts of two centuries. Although she is often associated with an older, rural America, the prize-winning novelist lived through the closing of the western frontier and became at home in a world of electricity and indoor lighting, as well as telephones, elevators, automobiles – a world much more like our own than like the older world depicted in her famous trilogy of novels about life on the prairies.
One scholar has framed the issue of Cather’s rise this way: “How, we ought to ask, does a girl raised on the Great Plains at the end of the nineteenth century become a major author in the canon of American literature?” Scholars have offered many answers, but they all ultimately fall short. The answer is hiding in plain sight: journalism. Willa Cather worked at newspapers and magazines until she gained the personal confidence, the professional connections, and the prose style that would carry her to the heights.
After that youthful career in journalism, Cather launched into an adult career in literature that brought her fame (and sales) as a novelist. In her fiction, Cather approached the leading edge of literary modernism, but then she balked, saying she would rather be thought of as part of the culture of the previous seven thousand years than to be thought of as part of the new culture that was emerging in the 1920s. She specifically rejected joining the ranks of her more experimental contemporaries like Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, much less the younger modernists like Hemingway and Woolf.
In other respects, though, Cather was a thoroughly, even radically, modern woman. As a girl in Nebraska, she embraced the bicycle and loved the freedom and mobility it gave her. She went to college and later moved to the country’s biggest city by herself. Never married, she was independent and became quite affluent entirely on her own. She was a woman who succeeded in both journalism and book publishing, fields that were still very much the domain of men.
She was also a lesbian in a world that had no category for her. For decades, Cather lived with her life partner, Edith Lewis, and the two traveled widely together. “ ‘Lesbian’ as an adjective accurately describes Cather and Lewis’s long relationship, and given their time and place, it is the right category for their individual identities,” according to Melissa Homestead, author of the newest and most thorough study of Cather’s life with Lewis. Cather’s sexuality – which was never visible or public – was long hidden, then fought over, then rediscovered and celebrated, and now more or less taken for granted.
During the early and mid-twentieth century, following her career in journalism, Willa Cather emerged as a prominent American novelist, who was both popular with the reading public and highly regarded by critics. Between 1912 and 1940, she published a dozen novels; all sold well, and one received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In those same years, she also published a collection of poems and three book-length works of non-fiction. In addition, she wrote hundreds and hundreds of shorter items, including reviews, criticism, and essays on writing and many more subjects.
She was herself the subject of several full-length and admiring profiles in major national magazines, and her work was praised by nearly all the major critics of her time. She was awarded honorary degrees from Columbia, Yale, Princeton, and Berkeley. After her death in 1947, several posthumous collections of her work appeared, about writing and other matters.
More recently, her letters have been collected and digitized. Although she has been in eclipse in recent decades among the general public and even among the reading public, Cather left one of the major legacies in American literature. Now, buoyed by growing interest in feminist and queer literary studies, Cather is enjoying a resurgence.
Like Twain, Cather was a literary realist, of a sort. Her writing, even at its most imaginative, has a disposition toward being reportorial. She was a great observer and recorder. Like Twain, she seemed to be a figure from the West in the eyes of the East Coast publishers, taste-makers, and cultural pooh-bahs. But she was not exactly a Western figure, either. Like Whitman, she contained multitudes.
Yes, she was a writer who celebrated the wide-open, empty grasslands and the (mostly) sturdy and practical settlers from northern and eastern Europe who fenced the land, broke the sod, and shaped the American heartland. But all the while, Cather herself was living in an apartment in the country’s most urban environment, Greenwich Village in New York City.
Cather was also a restless spirit, forever crossing boundaries. She moved from the prairies to Manhattan. She sometimes dressed as a boy, then tried to be typically feminine, then took on the role of a frank loving relationship with a woman, moving between gendered worlds for years. She worked in fiction and non-fiction, moving back and forth between genres for years, using pseudonyms (both male-sounding and female), frequently shifting her point of view. She traveled widely throughout her life, between New York and points north, south, east, and west. She was private and hard to pin down, elusive.
From her surviving letters, we can see a woman who was confident and could startle with her candor; at the same time, we can see a woman who did not want to be known in full by anyone. She wrote so much, over so many years, and yet she remains a blurry figure in some ways – often in motion to some distant place.
On the cusp of modernism, she recoiled and demanded that time stop. Now, a century on, her career invites us to explore the worlds she made and the issues that her career presents us with – from literary realism to sexuality, from West to East, from journalism to the arts. . .
[Adapted from the forthcoming book, The Democratic Art: The Role of Journalism in American Culture, by Christopher B. Daly]
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