Willa Cather was not just an author - although she was a prolific one. She was also an unofficial anthropologist, writing about life on the Great Plains and basing the majority of both her novels and her short stories on the people and the lives lived there. In reality, although she grew up in Nebraska, one of the Great Plains states, she moved to New York City at the age of thirty three and remained a New Yorker for the rest of her life. Cather was also one of the first successful American writers to brooch the subject of the fluidity of gender roles and identity at a time when men were men and women were women, both living conventionally as dictated by their gender.
Cather's first published work was seen in 1896, when she was hired to write fo Home Monthly, a successful magazine for women that fancied itself as an alternative Woman's Home Journal. She moved to Pittsburgh, worked as a teacher, and gave the world her first of many short stories, including the renowned Tommy, the Unsentimental, the story of an androgynous little girl from Nebraska who was given a boy's name, and who is a business whizz capable of saving her father's failing banking business. Tommy is a typical Cather heroine because she goes against the grain, and is different from societal norms. Cather's short stories were so well received that she soon published her first collection of them, entitled The Troll Garden. Some of Cather's best known and most well-received short stories appear in this collection.
Cather's next short story collection was the first volume of a successful partnership with a fledgling publishing house by the name of Alfred A.Knopf. They were well-liked by authors, and also very supportive of them. Cather had sought a change when she became unhappy with the lack of effort put forth by her previous publishers when it came to marketing her books. Ever the renaissance woman, she did not wait for someone else to address this problem for her; she did as the heroines of her stories did; she grasped the bull by the horns and addressed it herself. The decision to move publishers was a good one as she would end up with sixteen books published by Alfred A. Knopf.
By the early nineteen thirties, Cather's star was beginning to fall; having loved her simple tales of uncomplicated and real people, critics seemed to turn on her, branding her anachronistic, and calling her romantic and nostalgic. They also felt that her stories of the past were idealized. When the nation struggled, in the Great Depression, and also the Dust Bowl of the "dirty thirties" decimating the ecology and the environment of the prairies, Cather struggled to retain any social relevance whatsoever. Suddenly uncomplicated people with gumption and fluid gender identity seemed nothing to do with real life to a readership that struggled for money, and on the prairies in particular, struggled for air. Not surprisingly Cather did not take this criticism well, and was extremely discouraged; more encouraging, though, was that despite the fact she was seen as largely socially irrelevant escapism, she was still the best selling writer in America.
In all, Cather published an incredible fifty five short stories, including The Willing Muse, which became a bestseller in 1907, The Affair at Grover Station, published in two separate installments because of its unusual length, and A Wagner Matinee.
Today, Cather is considered one of America's foremost writers; she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her novel One Of Ours, the story of a Nebraska native who is privileged, but views himself as unfortunate and feels that he can't get a break. Cather passed away in 1947 at the age of seventy four.
