Willa Cather
In 1923, Willa Cather received the Pulitzer Prize for her novel One of Ours, a recognition that placed her among the prominent American writers of the early twentieth century. Born on 7 December 1873 in Gore, Cather was a citizen of the United States who wrote in the English language and built a career as a novelist and writer across several decades.
Her body of work includes novels, fiction, and poetry. Among her titles are Alexander's Bridge, O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, My Ántonia, A Lost Lady, The Professor's House, My Mortal Enemy, and Death Comes for the Archbishop, as well as The Troll Garden, April Twilights, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl. She became particularly associated with novels of life on the Great Plains, a subject that runs through a number of her works and that shaped her reputation as a writer attentive to that region and its people.
Cather died on 24 April 1947 in Manhattan. The Pulitzer Prize awarded for One of Ours in 1923 remains the most concrete marker of formal recognition she received during her lifetime, acknowledging her standing within American letters at a point when her output was still actively expanding.
Quotes by Willa Cather
Willa Cather's insights on:
One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.
The first time I deceived my grandparents I felt rather shabby, perhaps even the second time, but I soon ceased to think about it.
He would make a bouquet for a lovely lady; a bouquet gathered off the cheeks of the morning. . . these roses, only half awake, in the defencelessness of utter beauty.
The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.
A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves
All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver.
She began to wonder whether she would not do better to finish her life alone. What was left of life seemed unimportant.
Some memories are realities, and are better than anythingthat can ever happen to one again.
The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.
Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.