Cather was born in 1873 on her maternal grandmother's farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia.[18][19] Her father was Charles Fectigue Cather.[20] The Cather family originated in Wales,[21] the name deriving from Cadair Idris, a Gwynedd mountain.[22]: 3 Her mother was Mary Virginia Boak, a former school teacher.[23] By the time Cather turned twelve months old, the family had moved to Willow Shade, a Greek Revival-style home on 130 acres given to them by her paternal grandparents.[24]
Mary Cather had six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass,[B] Jessica, James, John, and Elsie.[27]: 5–7 Cather was closer to her brothers than to her sisters whom, according to biographer Hermione Lee, she "seems not to have liked very much."[28]: 36
At the urging of Charles Cather's parents, the family moved to Nebraska in 1883 when Willa was nine years old. The farmland appealed to Charles' father, and the family wished to escape the tuberculosis outbreaks that were rampant in Virginia.[28]: 30 Willa's father tried his hand at farming for eighteen months, then moved the family into the town of Red Cloud, where he opened a real estate and insurance business, and the children attended school for the first time.[29]: 43 Some of Cather's earliest work was first published in the Red Cloud Chief, the city's local paper,[30] and Cather read widely, having made friends with a Jewish couple, the Wieners, who offered her free access to their extensive library in Red Cloud.[31] At the same time, she made house calls with the local physician and decided to become a surgeon.[32][33] For a short while, she signed her name as William,[34] but this was quickly abandoned for Willa instead.[18]
In 1890, at the age of sixteen, Cather graduated from Red Cloud High School.[35] She moved to Lincoln, Nebraska to enroll at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In her first year, her essay on Thomas Carlyle was published in the Nebraska State Journal without her knowledge.[36][37] After this, she published columns for $1 apiece, saying that seeing her words printed on the page had "a kind of hypnotic effect", pushing her to continue writing.[37][38] After this experience, she became a regular contributor to the Journal. In addition to her work with the local paper, Cather served as the main editor of The Hesperian, the university's student newspaper, and became a writer for the Lincoln Courier.[39] While at the university, she learned mathematics from and was befriended by John J. Pershing, who later became General of the Armies and, like Cather, earned a Pulitzer Prize for his writing.[40][41] She changed her plans from studying science with the goal of becoming a physician, instead graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1895.[29]: 71
Cather's time in Nebraska, still considered a frontier state, was a formative experience for her: She was moved by the dramatic environment and weather, the vastness of the prairie, and the various cultures of the immigrant[42] and Native American families in the area.[43][44]
