Willa Cather

Willa Cather

Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Nebraska and graduated from the University of Nebraska. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, then at the age of 33 she moved to New York, where she lived for the rest of her life.

Read more about Willa Cather:  Early Life and Education, Career, Personal Life, Writing Influences, Legacy and Honors

Famous quotes by willa cather:

    The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
    Willa Cather (1876–1947)

    It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
    Willa Cather (1873–1947)

    ...what a thing it is to lie there all day in the fine breeze, with the pine needles dropping on one, only to return to the hotel at night so hungry that the dinner, however homely, is a fete, and the menu finer reading than the best poetry in the world! Yet we are to leave all this for the glare and blaze of Nice and Monte Carlo; which is proof enough that one cannot become really acclimated to happiness.
    Willa Cather (1876–1947)

    ...of all the shoddy foreigners one encounters, there are none so depressing as the London shoddy.
    Willa Cather (1876–1947)

    Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another—secret and passionate and intense—which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him.
    Willa Cather (1873–1947)