Willa Cather and her family moved from Virginia to Webster County, Nebraska, when she was nine years old. The family later settled in the town of Red Cloud. Shortly after graduating from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Cather moved to Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33, she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She spent the last 39 years of her life with her domestic partner, Edith Lewis, before being diagnosed with breast cancer and dying of a cerebral hemorrhage. Cather and Lewis are buried together in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.
Cather achieved recognition as a novelist of the frontier and pioneer experience. She wrote of the spirit of those settlers moving into the western states, many of them European immigrants in the nineteenth century. Common themes in her work include nostalgia and exile. A sense of place is an important element in Cather's fiction: physical landscapes and domestic spaces are for Cather dynamic presences against which her characters struggle and find community.
^Schwind, Jean (1985). "Latour's Schismatic Church: The Radical Meaning in the Pictorial Methods of Death Comes for the Archbishop". Studies in American Fiction. 13 (1): 71–88. doi:10.1353/saf.1985.0024. S2CID161453359.
^Morley, C. (September 1, 2009). "DAVID PORTER. On the Divide: The Many Lives of Willa Cather". The Review of English Studies. 60 (246): 674–676. doi:10.1093/res/hgp042.
^Carpentier, Martha C. (2007). "The Deracinated Self: Immigrants, Orphans, and the "Migratory Consciousness" of Willa Cather and Susan Glaspell". Studies in American Fiction. 35 (2): 132. doi:10.1353/saf.2007.0001. S2CID162245931.
^Jewell, Andrew (2007). "'Curious Survivals': The Letters of Willa Cather". New Letters. 74 (1): 154–175.
^Baker, Bruce (1968). "Nebraska Regionalism in Selected Works of Willa Gather". Western American Literature. 3 (1): 19. doi:10.1353/wal.1968.0000. S2CID159958823.
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