Early Life and Education
She was born Wilella Sibert Cather in 1873 on her maternal grandmother's farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia (see Willa Cather Birthplace). Her father was Charles Fectigue Cather (d. 1928), whose family had lived on land in the valley for six generations. Her mother was Mary Virginia Boak (d. 1931), a former school teacher. Within a year of Cather's birth, the family moved to Willow Shade, a Greek Revival-style home on 130 acres given to them by her paternal grandparents.
The Cathers moved to Nebraska in 1883, joining Charles' parents, when Willa was nine years old. Her father tried his hand at farming for eighteen months; then he moved the family into the town of Red Cloud, where he opened a real estate and insurance business, and the children attended school for the first time. Cather's time in the western state, still on the frontier, was a deeply formative experience for her. She was intensely moved by the dramatic environment and weather, and the various cultures of the European-American, immigrant and Native American families in the area. Her town was named for the renowned Oglala Lakota chief.
Mary Cather had six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass, Jessica, James, John, and Elsie. Cather was closest to her brothers, less close to her sisters whom, according to her biographer Hermione Lee, Cather "seems not to have liked very much."
Cather had planned to major in science at the University of Nebraska – she hoped to become a medical doctor. After her essay on Thomas Carlyle was published in the Nebraska State Journal during her freshman year, she became a regular contributor to the Journal, changed her major, and graduated in 1894 with a B.A. in English.
Read more about this topic: Willa Cather
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)
“The new concept of the child as equal and the new integration of children into adult life has helped bring about a gradual but certain erosion of these boundaries that once separated the world of children from the word of adults, boundaries that allowed adults to treat children differently than they treated other adults because they understood that children are different.”
—Marie Winn (20th century)
“There are words in that letter to his wife, respecting the education of his daughters, which deserve to be framed and hung over every mantelpiece in the land. Compare this earnest wisdom with that of Poor Richard.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)