In 2021, Willa Cather, representing Nebraska, will join only a few other women sculptures in National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Willa Cather (1873-1947) is an author of complex American stories, written from a perspective and in a style that literature had not been seen previously. When she was nine, Cather and her family traveled west from Virginia to Webster County, Nebraska. The region had been largely settled by the Kitkehatchi band of the Pawnee tribe who had farmed and hunted buffalo along the Republican River for centuries—and where the displaced Pawnee Nation still considers to be the center of the universe. Moving to Red Cloud exposed Cather to new ethnic groups and childhood experiences. Through her lifelong learning and many interests, she would come to explore, shape, and write about these and other new worlds throughout her life, while often elevating the immigrant experience.
A self-made woman, Cather told stories of homesteaders, the settlement and growth of middle America through the arrival of diverse immigrant groups during the late-nineteenth century, the legacies of slavery and the Civil War, the First World War, community, and the pursuit of artistic success. Decades after her death, her work remains popular, relevant, and loved by readers worldwide.
The following points are illustrative of her importance as an American writer active in the first part of the 20th Century, but whose work and influence resonate into the 21st Century:
- Cather took regional stories—with universal themes—and elevated them to a national and international readership (while also elevating Nebraska in her love for it, and its people).
- Cather’s writing details and explores the complication of precise historical moments.
- Cather’s writing endures, and is still widely read and critiqued. It has been translated into over forty languages.
- Cather, not an especially political writer, evoked the cultural and political times her characters know.
- Cather’s career began with stunning success in journalism—several years as managing editor of the leading monthly magazine of the day, McClure’s—which she left to write fulltime in 1912.
- Cather was a self-made woman who did not conform to societal norms; she was urbane and urban, ironically given her largely western subjects, for she made New York City her home from 1906-1947 for most of her life.
- Cather was the first American writer to use the Great Plains as a detailed setting for fiction; she taught her readers how to see the prairie-plains. She built worlds.
- Cather’s evocation of the American Southwest, with its mix of diverse cultures—Indigenous, Hispanic, and other Euroamerican—is singular in her work. She did the same with seventeenth-century New France in Shadows on the Rock.
- Cather was above all a creator: of her own career, of her persona, and of literary worlds.
- Cather was an unspoken ally and presence within the LGBTQ+ community of her day.
Since 1955, Cather’s legacy has been shared from Red Cloud through the ongoing efforts of the Willa Cather Foundation and their National Willa Cather Center.
