Willa Cather was born in 1873 in Virginia. She would be the eldest of seven children born to Charles and Virginia Cather. The family left the state of Virginia when Willa was nine years old and moved to the prairie surrounding Red Cloud, Nebraska, with the Cather grandparents and extended family. Both landscapes would influence Cather's writing throughout her life: she explored the contentious racial politics of Virginia in her last novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl (famously analyzed by Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination) and was best known as a writer for the Prairie Trilogy set in Nebraska: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia....
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