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Willa Cather (1873
- 1947)
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 Death
Comes for the Archbishop by Willa
Silbert Cather
Novel by Willa Cather, published in 1927. The
novel is based on the lives of Bishop Jean Baptiste L'Amy and his
vicar Father Joseph Machebeut and is considered emblematic of the
author's moral and spiritual concerns. Death Comes for the
Archbishop traces the friendship and adventures of Bishop Jean
Latour and vicar Father Joseph Vaillant as they organize the new
Roman Catholic diocese of New Mexico. Latour is patrician,
intellectual, introverted; Vaillant, practical, outgoing,
sanguine. Friends since their childhood in France, the clerics
triumph over corrupt Spanish priests, natural adversity, and the
indifference of the Hopi and Navajo to establish their church and
build a cathedral in the wilderness. The novel, essentially a
study of character, explores Latour's inner conflicts and his
relationship with the land, which through the author's powerful
description becomes an imposing character in its own right. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
 Willa
Cather : The Emerging Voice by Sharon O'Brien
This is the first in-depth biography of Willa
Cather in thirty years, and the first ever that fully integrates
her life and work. The author of such classics as Death Comes to
the Archbishop and O Pioneers! was a complex, passionate and
gifted woman trying to forge a new kind of identity for herself as
a woman and artist before there were adequate models for this kind
of self. "Voice" is the metaphor Cather used to describe
her attainment of literary identity and authority, a complex
attainment for a woman writer who at first viewed femininity and
creativity as incompatible. O'Brien asks two central questions:
How did Cather pass through a stage of male identification when
she adopted male dress and posed as "William Cather" to
become the first woman writer who created the first strong,
autonomous and successful women heroes in American literature? How
did she move from a literary apprenticeship she later associated
with Jamesian imitation and inauthentic speech to a literary
maturity in which she took "the road home" to her
Nebraska past? The book makes full use of biographical and
literary materials that have been slighted in previous
biographies: Cather's personal and professional correspondence,
family letters and documents, photographs, and the early short
stories as well as the major fiction. This is the first biography
to deal openly and seriously with her lesbianism, exploring the
importance of female friendships in her life and work and
assessing the impact Cather's need to conceal her sexual identity
had on the creative process. O'Brien draws in particular on new
psychoanalytic theories that stress the importance of the
mother-daughter bond to the formation of female identity. The book
concentrates on Cather's childhood, adolescence, young womanhood
and lengthy apprenticehsip, with references to later biographical
and literary patterns which are used to illuminate the early
years. This is a fascinating portrait of how someone becomes a
writer.
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Willa Cather (1873-1947)
WRITER
Born in Virginia, Cather moved with her family
to Red Cloud, Nebraska at age 11. It was there that, for four
years, she enacted a gender rebellion whereby she referred to
herself as William Cather Jr., wore “male” attire and a crew
cut and spoke in a bass voice.
Upon entering college she dropped her masculine
look, but not the personality. In 1891, Cather switched from
pre-med to literature and began writing for campus and local
publications. After college she worked as a journalist and editor
in Lincoln, Nebraska, Pittsburgh and New York before finishing her
first novel Alexander’s Bridge in 1912. Popular and
critical acclaim followed that novel and she went on to publish 19
more, including the 1922 Pulitzer Prize-winning Out of Ours.
Cather destroyed most of her personal
correspondence before her death and it is thought that she would
have challenged attempts to find lesbian context in her work.
Letters written by Cather do provide some insight into her
personal life, including one written while she was in college to
Louise Pound in which she bemoans her “unnatural love” for
Pound. Some biographers and scholars now view her as a lesbian and
explore her writings from this standpoint. Some historians cite
her reticence as evidence of the increase in the awareness and
disapproval of lesbianism in the 1890s, contrasting her unease
with the acceptance previously afforded romantic friendships
between women. Cather lived with Edith Lewis in New York for 40
years.
Other books by Cather include: O Pioneers!,
Death Comes for the Archbishop and The Song of the Lark.
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Excerpt:
There is no proof that Cather ever came close to
marriage. The men she loved the most were her father and brothers.
“She simply had no need for heterosexual relationships, she was
married to her art.” (Woodress 86). In her book Willa Cather :
The Emerging Voice Sharon O’Brien discusses Cather’s
sexuality. She dwells predominantly on Cather’s relationship
with her beloved friend Louise Pound and says “That Willa Cather
was a lesbian should not be an unexamined assumption, however, but
a conclusion reached after considering questions of definition,
evidence and interpretation.” (127). Furthermore, after her
affair with Pound ended, Cather found “more enduring and
supportive relationships” with Isabelle McClung and later with
Edith Lewis, yet she never declared publicly that she was in fact
a lesbian (137)...
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From GayGate.com
Excerpt:
Willa Cather was born on December 7, 1873, in
Black Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia. When she was nine,
her father moved the family to a ranch near Red Cloud, Nebraska.
After an unsuccessful year of homesteading, they settled in the
town itself. A tomboy who was at home in the saddle, Cather grew
up with the children of immigrant farmers--Swedes, Bohemians,
Russians, Germans. She was educated at home, and at schools in Red
Cloud and Lincoln. At the University of Nebraska in Lincoln--where
she first arrived dressed as William Cather, her opposite-sex
twin--she supported herself by writing drama criticism for the
Nebraska State Journal. While at university, she fell
tempestuously in love with Louise Pound, a brilliant fellow
student and athlete who would later become the first woman ever
elected to the Nebraska Sports Hall of Fame. Some of Cather's
passionate letters to Pound survive...
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Names Index:
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