Willa Cather

Willa Cather grew up on the Nebraska prairie among Bohemian and Scandinavian immigrants, worked as a journalist and editor in Pittsburgh and New York, and in her forties began the novels of the plains that made her name. My Ántonia is the memory of an immigrant girl by the boy who loved her; A Lost Lady the portrait of a pioneer’s widow in a declining town. She wrote in a plain, exact prose against the fashions of the twenties, and her later books turned to the Southwest and Quebec. She asked that no letters be published; the ban expired in 2011.