Willa Cather Essay, Research Paper

Willa Cather

born in December of 1873 in Black Creek Valley in Virginia

At the age of 9 moved to Nebraska frontier to join grandparents

got her schooling in Nebraska and she attended the University of Nebraska in Lincoln

began her writing career during college writing short stories and poetry for the Nebraska State Journal and the Lincoln Courier

After graduating from Nebraska in 1895 she worked as a teacher and journalist in Pittsburgh

She wrote a collection of short stories called The Troll Garden in 1905 which had A Wagner Matinee published in it

This led to her getting a job editing and writing for Mc Clure s Magazine in New York City, and she helped the magazine from going under

In 1912 she resigned from Mc Clure s Magazine to pursue writing short stories and fiction in the quiet Greenwich village in New York

Much of her writing is reflected back to her life living in Nebraska, her settings and values of the stories come from this region

She believed that your writing must come from experiences before adolescence

Many themes of her stories were shown in the strength and courage of frontier settlers and wrote about the need for artists not to be set back by inhibiting influences, which is one of the main themes in A Wagner Matinee

Like other writers of her time, she wrote about disillusionment and she was skeptic toward machines and advances in technology

she loved music, which is reflected in this story with the German composer, Richard, Wagner

She won a pulitzer prize in 1923 for One of Ours, and she is known as one of the great writers of the twentieth century

Works Cited

Anderson, Robert. Willa Cather. Elements of Literature. Fifth Course. Us: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1993.

Columbia University Press. Cather, Willa Sibert. 2000 . . 2 Mar 2001.

University of Nebraska Press. The Willa Cather Archive. 2000. . 1 Mar 2001.

Characters

main characters are Clark and Aunt Georginia

Clark is Georginia s nephew that she raised after his parent s death

She lives in Nebraska with his Uncle Howard, where Clark left in order to pursue the American dream and move to Boston

Clark is shown to be a dynamic character, and his views of his aunt change during the course of the story, even though he loves her a lot, he describes her very crudely

Passage starting on page 519 2nd col. with But Mrs. Springer…

this is showing how tough her life is in Nebraska, her outward appearance is shown because of the change of her life from living in Boston and moving to Nebraska where she lives a tough farming life with farming and little opportunities for her

Cather also gives very good descriptions of the character s hands as a result of their