Even now, Red Cloud, Nebraska, has a certain kind of peace. A wind that hasn’t changed much in more than a century blows through grass. It’s the kind of silence that enters a person at a young age and doesn’t truly go away, and Willa Cather never experienced it. At the age of nine, she moved there from Virginia, and for some reason, the wind-scoured, level terrain served as the inspiration for almost all of her subsequent writings. It would be easy to dismiss this as a coincidence. Most likely it wasn’t.
Cather appeared to be fully aware of what had transpired. When you read her novels sequentially, you begin to believe her when she says that most of what a writer has to deal with is absorbed before the age of fifteen. The prairie frequently appears, more as a character with its own emotions and resentments than as scenery. The true meaning of that landscape in her fiction has been the subject of decades of debate among critics. It hasn’t been settled completely, and perhaps that’s okay.
Alexander’s Bridge (1912), her debut book, stands out. The story, which takes place far from Nebraska, is about a bridge engineer who is falling apart due to an affair, and Cather later appeared to be almost ashamed of it. However, it made her a full-time fiction writer, which was more important than the book itself. The actual story follows: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia, which are sometimes referred to as her Prairie Trilogy, though Cather never used that term herself.
My Ántonia usually receives the most attention, and it’s easy to understand why given how readers react to it now. It centers on Jim Burden, an orphan who recently moved to the Nebraska plains, and his friendship with Ántonia Shimerda, a young Bohemian immigrant who is a few years older than him. The book’s structure is a little odd; Cather tells the story of an immigrant woman almost entirely through the eyes of a man who isn’t her, filtered through memory, distance, and a good deal of longing. Since Cather’s closest relationships throughout her life tended to be with women, scholars have debated whether Jim’s voice contains hints of her own identity for years. How much weight that theory merits is still up for debate. But it’s difficult to ignore once you see it.
When reading these books decades later, it’s simple to overlook how radical the basic idea was at the time. The title character, and consequently the narrator, treated the Catholic immigrant girl from Eastern Europe as someone whose life mattered just as much as anyone else’s, rather than as an object of curiosity. It was less common than it ought to have been in 1918 for Cather to write that without sentimentality or condescension.
Not all of her writings held up well over time. The 1940 book Sapphira and the Slave Girl received harsh criticism for how it addressed morality and slavery. Some readers claimed that Cather was mired in the past and unable or unwilling to face the present. Since then, the book has been accompanied by this criticism, which is worth considering rather than trying to explain away.
However, controversy wasn’t the only aspect of her career. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her World War I novel One of Ours, and while she was still living, authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis praised her work. That is not insignificant. Many authors don’t receive that level of recognition until long after it is no longer beneficial to them.
Red Cloud never truly let go of Cather, even after her death in 1947. The Willa Cather Foundation continues to publish a literary review in her honor, conduct tours of her childhood home, and allow anyone who is interested enough to stroll through the prairie she wrote about. It’s difficult to ignore how little separates the real world from the fiction when you’re standing there. Perhaps that was always the intention.
