Willa Cather in 250 to 250

Rebecca Solnit talks about Willa Cather for Heather Cox Richardson’s 250 to 250 series of short videos. Here’s the full text, delivered in about fifty-one seconds:

“There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made,” wrote Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather in her 1918 novel My Ántonia. Cather was born in Virginia in 1873, but it was her family’s move to Red Cloud, Nebraska, about ten years later, that inspired her work. In her novels and stories, Cather explored the connections between people and the land on which immigrants built the nation at the same time as they built their lives. Her close observations of western life, delivered in straightforward prose, created an immediacy that evoked the profound beauty of the land, the passions of the people who lived on it, and the connections between the two.

As someone who’s read virtually all of Cather, I find this capsule picture — land, immigrants, passion — sadly inadequate. Here’s my try:

A teenage girl who called herself William, a young woman who made her way as a journalist in Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., a Virginia-born Nebraskan who later lived in Greenwich Village and on Park Avenue, a celebrant of both immigrant and indigenous cultures, a keen observer of the dynamics of family life who sustained a decades-long partnership with another woman, a deeply American writer who loved all things French, Willa Cather stands as a major figure in modern fiction. Almost eighty years after her death, the sharp, lyrical prose of such works as My Ántonia , The Song of the Lark , and The Professor’s House invites and rewards continued rereading.

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

[At the beginning of My Ántonia , Cather glosses the pronunciation of Ántonia, which you’ll hear mispronounced in the video: “The Bohemian name Ántonia is strongly accented on the first syllable, like the English name Anthony, and the i is, of course, given the sound of long e. The name is pronounced An′-ton-ee-ah.“ And I’ve always heard Cather as rhyming with gather . The sentence from My Ántonia, mispunctuated in the in-video captions, is punctuated correctly here. And I’ll take the opportunity to say it: The Professor’s House is one of the best (and narratively daring) novels I’ve ever read.]