In this collection, though, my favorite is O Pioneers! Everyone seems to include The Great Gatsby among the 'great American novels' but no one mentions O Pioneers! in the same company. I'm glad I re-read it because it's beautiful and heartbreaking. I mean, I just didn't care - and frankly, I was not mature enough to appreciate it. I had read My Antonia in school and that was enough to turn me off Willa Cather. This book came highly recommended from a friend. She died of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of 73 in New York City.

In 1944, Cather received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, an award given once a decade for an author's total accomplishments.

She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943. In later life, she experienced much negative criticism for her conservative politics and became reclusive, burning some of her letters and personal papers, including her last manuscript. She travelled widely and often spent summers in New Brunswick, Canada. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, 'One of Ours' (1922), set during World War I. Her novels on frontier life brought her to national recognition. Because of this, she changed her major and graduated with a bachelor's degree in English.Īfter graduation in 1894, she worked in Pittsburgh as writer for various publications and as a school teacher for approximately 13 years, thereafter moving to New York City for the remainder of her life. She then attended the University of Nebraska, initially planning to become a physician, but after writing an article for the Nebraska State Journal, she became a regular contributor to this journal. Wilella Sibert Cather was born in Back Creek Valley (Gore), Virginia, in December 7, 1873. This meticulous digital edition from Heritage Publishing is a faithful reproduction of the original texts. Just as accessible and enjoyable for today's modern readers as they would have been when first published well over a century ago, the novels are some of the great works of American literature and continue to be widely read and studied throughout the world. It tells the moving story of immigrant pioneers whose persistence and strength helped to build America. My Antoniá is one of Cather's earliest novels. It revolves around the fascinating story of a young girl who heads to the big city in search of the American dream. The Song of the Lark is the self-portrait of an artist in the making. O Pioneers! is a powerful early Cather novel that tells the compelling tale of a young girl with the tough task of taking care of her frontier family after their father's death. The Prairie Trilogy is Pulitzer prize-winning author Willa Cather's highly acclaimed series of novels that deal with the ordinary everyday lives of Americans in plainspoken language.

Willa cather's great plains trilogy