Biography Essay

Willa Cather is an outstanding example of a writer whose work is deeply rooted in a sense of place and at the same time universal in its treatment of theme and character. The corner of earth that she is best known for depicting is Nebraska, where she lived as an adolescent and young woman and where she was educated. This dominant subject is the setting for all or significant parts of six of her twelve novels and many of her short stories. Her typical preoccupation with her Nebraska material is, as one of her oldest friends, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, put it in a summarizing article, "the effect of a new country ... on people transplanted to it from the old traditions of a stable, complex civilization." She evokes indelibly the shaggy virgin prairie around Red Cloud, Nebraska, during the late decades of the nineteenth century, the Scandinavian...