Interesting facts about willa cather
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Willa Cather Biography
Cather was born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia, on December 7, 1873, the eldest of an eventual seven children raised by Charles and Mary Virginia Cather. Cathers had been in the area since the 1700s, and Back Creek, near Winchester west of Washington, was a place deeply affected by the Civil War. It was a border area, one of the counties in Virginia adjacent to the new state of West Virginia, and the contending armies had vied for control there (Winchester shifted between sides multiple times). The Cathers, who had a sheep farm, were sympathetic to the Union and some of Cather's relations were officials of the reconstruction. Emotions ran deep and the effects of the tumult were slow healing.
Photograph of Willa as a young girl, taken in Richmond, Virginia
In this place Cather's first litmus years were impressed with memories of rural Virginia and of the deep culture of the South while the war's discord, still near at hand when Cather lived there, remained a great fact. This, the place she started out from and eventually returned to in her last novel, Sa Willa Cather was born on December 7, 1873, near Winchester, Va. She was the oldest of Charles and Mary Virginia’s seven children. Her father was a farmer and businessman; her mother a schoolteacher. In 1883, the family moved to Nebraska to join her Cather grandparents and uncle. This uprooting left her deeply homesick for Virginia. She later described her first reaction to Nebraska’s stark landscape as “a kind of erasure of personality.” After farming for over a year, Charles Cather resettled the family in nearby Red Cloud, Neb., where they lived in town and her father dealt in real estate and insurance. In Red Cloud, the inspiration for Black Hawk in My Ántonia, Cather established the relationships with friends and neighbors that would be the most important sources for her writing. She listened to the stories of her immigrant neighbors from Bohemia, Denmark, Norway and Sweden and their struggles to make a living from the land and find acceptance from their American-born neighbors. During this time, Cather became friends with Annie Sadilek, the model •
Willa Cather Biography
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Aesthetics, Values and Autobiography in the Works of Willa Cather and Marguerite Duras
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