This program will be held in-person at the Newberry in partnership with the National Willa Cather Center.
Willa Cather was one of the most singular American novelists of the 20th century. She broke new ground as an artist by emphasizing ordinary lives and struggles, lending dignity and significance to her characters’ inner worlds. Behind the appearance of serenity in her stories, however, stands a complex writer of conflict who was doubtful of even the possibility of knowing anything for certain.
Join us for an evening of selections from Willa Cather’s fiction, criticism, and letters, curated by Peter Cipkowski of the National Willa Cather Center.
Following the program, guests will be invited to view items from the Newberry collections related to Cather, her life, and her works.
Cost and Registration
This program is free and open to all. Advance registration required.
Registration opens May 1.
About Willa Cather
Willa Cather (1873-1947) is defined by a lifetime determination, struggle, and steady growth. Unlike some writers who peak early, she developed her voice over time. By the time Cather gained recognition with O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918), she was already well into middle age. Years of journalism, teaching, and editing shaped her, but her ultimate goal was to succeed as an author that produced enduring literature.
In fact, Cather was something of a critical darling during her lifetime and revered by peers. Rebecca West, Katherine Ann Porter, and Eudora Welty wrote loving essays about Cather. Sinclair Lewis called her the greatest American novelist when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1930. He said she should have gotten it instead. Fitzgerald admired her to the point of plagiarism, as he himself admitted. Faulkner considered her one of the foremost novelists, and he too shows her influence. “We have nothing better than she is,” Wallace Stevens wrote to her friend. Virginia Woolf remarked that Cather had “all the accomplishments of culture without a trace of its excess.”
In addition to dozens of short stories, she produced 12 novels always striving to strip away, as she said, “the detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole.” Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours in 1923. She won the William Dean Howells Medal for Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and the Prix Femina for Shadows on the Rock (1932). Cather was the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Princeton, and she appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1931.
Contemporary readers value Cather’s quality quietly nuanced characters, masterful language, and sensitive explorations of place. Her life and work inspire scholarly analysis and debate, and she endures as an author who elevated a quintessential American experience into an international literary legacy.
About the Photo
William Morrison, Haymarket Theatre, 1895. Photographic portrait of Willa Cather, who had traveled to Chicago from Lincoln for a week of opera and theater. Morrison was well-known as a photographer of artists, with his studio located in the theater. Here Cather wears an elaborate hat and bison-trimmed cape.