Willa Sibert Cather was born December 7, 1873, near Winchester, Virginia. When she was about ten years old her family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska, where many of her novels and short stories are set. "I felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything," she told an interviewer many years later. "It was a kind of erasure of personality." 

Following her education at the University of Nebraska, where she at first studied medicine, Cather became a newspaperwoman and teacher in Pittsburgh. In 1906, she moved to New York City to work as an editor onMcClure's Magazine. She eventually left journalism to devote herself to writing fiction full time. Her novels include Alexander's Bridge (1912), O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), My Ántonia (1918), One of Ours (1922), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, A Lost Lady (1923),The Professor's House (1925), My Mortal Enemy (1926), Death Comes For the Archbishop (1927), Shadows on the Rock (1931), Lucy Gayheart(1935), and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). 

Willa Cather died on April 24, 1947, in New York City.

Books by Willa Cather

My Antonia

by Willa Cather

Willa Cather's classic My Antonia is the story of the daughter of an immigrant family that sets out to farm the untamed prairie land of Nebraska in the late 19th century. Told to us from the perspective of Jim Burden, an orphan who comes to live at his grandparent's neighboring farm, this is an enduring American classic rich with the beautiful imagery of the midwestern plains.

The Professor's House

by Willa Cather