Many years from now I will still be groping for a sober word to say about this. Some books resist analysis, the smart review, the quick response. Cather's prose is so sensual, her transmitting of physical experience so direct, that I feel I have just returned from a New Mexico all gold and orange and green and baking in stark sunlight as I ride my mule towards shelter behind cool cloister walls. Will I ever comprehend it? Will I ever be wise enough, my heart big enough, my life lived enough? Also in my twenties, I read I Heard the Owl Call My Name with wonder now I find that book is like a single episode in this one.

Now I feel the same about Death Comes For the Archbishop. At age twenty, hearing Nina Simone sing 'Black is the Colour of My True True Love's Hair', I felt my heart couldn't contain that song it must consume me. A writer so humble, her words so transparent, that she seems to disappear behind the curtain of the text, her elegant shadow barely visible in its folds. The work of a writer with nothing to prove. I'm only halfway through it but I don't care how it ends every chapter is so complete in itself, every word such unmitigated pleasure that I would be stunned – absolutely floored – if Cather somehow fumbled the ball in the next 150 pages. She died of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of 73 in New York City. In 1944, Cather received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, an award given once a decade for an author's total accomplishments. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943.

In later life, she experienced much negative criticism for her conservative politics and became reclusive, burning some of her letters and personal papers, including her last manuscript. She travelled widely and often spent summers in New Brunswick, Canada.

In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, 'One of Ours' (1922), set during World War I. Her novels on frontier life brought her to national recognition. Because of this, she changed her major and graduated with a bachelor's degree in English.Īfter graduation in 1894, she worked in Pittsburgh as writer for various publications and as a school teacher for approximately 13 years, thereafter moving to New York City for the remainder of her life. She then attended the University of Nebraska, initially planning to become a physician, but after writing an article for the Nebraska State Journal, she became a regular contributor to this journal. Wilella Sibert Cather was born in Back Creek Valley (Gore), Virginia, in December 7, 1873.

Willa cather death