Willa Cather – First Edition Books Identification Guide

Willa Sibert Cather (born Wilella Sibert Cather; 1873 – 1947) was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.

Although Cather began her writing career as a journalist, she made a distinction between journalism, which she saw as being primarily informative, and literature, which she saw as an art form. Cather’s work is often marked by—and criticized for—its nostalgic tone and themes drawn from memories of her early years on the American plains. Consequently, a sense of place is integral to her work: notions of land, the frontier, pioneering and relationships with western landscapes are recurrent. Even when her heroines were placed in an urban environment, the influence of place was critical, and the way that power was displayed through room layout and furniture is evident in her novels like My Mortal Enemy. Though she hardly confined herself to writing exclusively about the Midwest, Cather is virtually inseparable from the Midwestern identity that she actively cultivated (even though she was not a “native” Midwesterner). While Cather is said to have significantly altered her literary approach in each of her novels, this stance is not universal; some critics have charged Cather with being out of touch with her times and failing to use more experimental techniques in her writing, such as stream of consciousness, as well as defining her literary genre as nothing but romantic.

Despite her success, she was the subject of much criticism, particularly surrounding One of Ours. Her close friend, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, saw the novel as a betrayal of the realities of war, not understanding how to “bridge the gap between [Cather’s] idealized war vision … and my own stark impressions of war as lived.” Similarly, Ernest Hemingway took issue with her portrayal of war, writing in a 1923 letter: “Wasn’t [the novel’s] last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode after episode, Catherized. Poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere.”

Cather achieved recognition as a novelist of the frontier and pioneer experience. She wrote of the spirit of those settlers moving into the western states, many of them European immigrants in the nineteenth century. Common themes in her work include nostalgia and exile. A sense of place is an important element in Cather’s fiction: physical landscapes and domestic spaces are for Cather dynamic presences against which her characters struggle and find community.

Cather was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 1945 and underwent a mastectomy on January 14, 1946. About a year later, on April 24, 1947, Cather died of a cerebral hemorrhage, at the age of 73.

Willa Cather – First Editions Identification Guide

Willa Cather – First Printing Dust Jackets Identification Guide

Gallery of First state Dust Jackets of Willa Cather’s works. Only includes the first appearance in book form. Either the UK or US edition and does not include later printings.

Reference:

• Wikipedia