These critics read the heroic wartime section of the book literally, which is a strange failure of comprehension. Poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere.” (Hemingway was bitter over the novel’s “big sales,” and it showed.) I identified episode after episode, Catherized.

Mencken wrote that the first half, which is about protagonist Claude Weaver’s young adult years on a farm in Nebraska, was very good, and the second, which follows Claude to France and the trenches in World War I, operated “at the level of a serial in the Ladies’ Home Journal.” Playwright Sidney Howard wrote in Bookman: “It seems to me a book to show what a woman can write supremely and what she cannot write at all… the pity is that Miss Cather did not know war for the big bowwow stuff that it is and stick to her own farms and farmer folk.”īut the most memorable comment was one that Ernest Hemingway wrote to Edmund Wilson in a 1923 letter: “Wasn’t last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. Reviewing the book in The Smart Set, H.L. John the Divine.When Willa Cather’s fifth novel, One of Ours, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, it was divisive among critics. Knopf, 1922), which won the Pulitzer Prize My Antonia (Houghton Mifflin, 1918) and O, Pioneers! (Houghton Mifflin, 1913).Ĭather was awarded a gold medal in fiction by the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1944. She died in New York City on April 24, 1947, and is memorialized at the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral Church of St. In 1906, she moved to New York City to take an editorial position at McClure’s Magazine, where she worked until 1911, then left to focus again on her creative writing.Ĭather is the author of twenty books and best known for her works of fiction, including Death Comes for the Archbishop (Alfred A. In 1903, she published her first book, April Twilights (The Gorham Press), a collection of poems, and began writing and publishing short stories. After a few years, she took a break to teach high school English and focus on her creative writing.

Her family moved to Nebraska in 1883, ultimately settling in the town of Red Cloud, where the National Willa Cather Center is located today. She attended the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.Ĭather moved to Pittsburgh in 1896 to pursue a career in journalism and work for the women’s magazine Home Monthly. Willa Cather was born in Virginia on December 7, 1873.

Willa cather pulitzer prize book