In 1896, Cather was hired to write for a women's magazine, Home Monthly, and moved to Pittsburgh.[11][45] There, she wrote journalistic pieces, short stories, and poetry.[38] A year later, after the magazine was sold,[46] she became a telegraph editor and critic for the Pittsburgh Leader and frequently contributed poetry and short fiction to The Library, another local publication.[47] In Pittsburgh, she taught Latin, algebra, and English composition at Central High School for one year;[48] she then taught English and Latin at Allegheny High School, where she came to head the English department.[49][50]
Shortly after moving to Pittsburgh, Cather wrote short stories, including publishing "Tommy, the Unsentimental" in the Home Monthly,[51] about a Nebraskan girl with a masculine name who looks like a boy and saves her father's bank business. Janis P. Stout calls this story one of several Cather works that "demonstrate the speciousness of rigid gender roles and give favorable treatment to characters who undermine conventions."[52] Her first book, a collection of poetry called April Twilights, was published in 1903.[C] Shortly after this, in 1905, Cather's first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden, was published. It contained some of her most famous stories, including "A Wagner Matinee", "The Sculptor's Funeral", and "Paul's Case".[61]
After Cather was offered an editorial position at McClure's Magazine in 1906, she moved to New York City.[62] During her first year at McClure's, the newspaper published a critical series of articles of the religious leader Mary Baker Eddy, crediting freelance journalist Georgine Milmine as the author. Cather contributed to the series, but there has been some debate as to how much. Milmine had performed copious amounts of research, but she did not have the resources to produce a manuscript independently, and McClure's employed Cather and a few other editors including Burton J. Hendrick to assist her.[63] This biography was serialized in McClure's over the next eighteen months and then published in book form.[64] McClure's also serialized Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912). While most reviews were favorable,[65][66] such as The Atlantic calling the writing "deft and skillful",[67] Cather herself soon saw the novel as weak and shallow.[68]
Cather followed Alexander's Bridge with her three novels set in the Great Plains, which eventually became both popular and critical successes: O Pioneers! (1913),[69] The Song of the Lark (1915),[70] and My Ántonia (1918),[71] which are—taken together—sometimes referred to as her "Prairie Trilogy".[72][73] It is this succession of plains-based novels for which Cather was celebrated for her use of plainspoken language about ordinary people.[74][75] Sinclair Lewis, for example, praised her work for making Nebraska available to the wider world for the first time.[76] After writing The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald lamented that it was a failure in comparison to My Ántonia.[77]
1920s
As late as 1920, Cather became dissatisfied with the performance of her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, which devoted an advertising budget of only $300 to My Ántonia,[78] and refused to pay for all the illustrations she commissioned for the book from Władysław T. Benda.[71] What's more, the physical quality of the books was poor.[79] That year, she turned to the young publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf, which had a reputation for supporting its authors through advertising campaigns.[78] She also liked the look of its books and had been impressed with its edition of Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson.[78] She so enjoyed their style that all her Knopf books of the 1920s—save for one printing of her short story collection Youth and the Bright Medusa—matched in design on their second and subsequent printings.[80]
By this time, Cather was firmly established as a major American writer, receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her World War I-based novel, One of Ours.[78] She followed this up with the popular Death Comes for the Archbishop in 1927, selling 86,500 copies in just two years,[81] and which has been included on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the twentieth century.[78] Two of her three other novels of the decade—A Lost Lady and The Professor's House—elevated her literary status dramatically. She was invited to give several hundred lectures to the public, earned significant royalties, and sold the movie rights to A Lost Lady. Her other novel of the decade, the 1926 My Mortal Enemy, received no widespread acclaim—and in fact, neither she nor her life partner, Edith Lewis, made significant mention of it later in their lives.[82]
Despite her success, she was the subject of much criticism, particularly surrounding One of Ours. Her close friend, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, saw the novel as a betrayal of the realities of war, not understanding how to "bridge the gap between [Cather's] idealized war vision ... and my own stark impressions of war as lived."[83] Similarly, Ernest Hemingway took issue with her portrayal of war, writing in a 1923 letter: "Wasn't [the novel's] last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode after episode, Catherized. Poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere."[84]
1930s
By the 1930s, an increasingly large share of critics began to dismiss her as overly romantic and nostalgic, unable to grapple with contemporary issues:[85] Granville Hicks, for instance, charged Cather with escaping into an idealized past to avoid confronting them.[86][87] And it was particularly in the context of the hardships of the Great Depression in which her work was seen as lacking social relevance.[88] Similarly, critics—and Cather herself[89]—were disappointed when her novel A Lost Lady was made into a film; the film had little resemblance to the novel.[90][91]
Cather's lifelong conservative politics,[92][D] appealing to critics such as Mencken, Randolph Bourne, and Carl Van Doren, soured her reputation with younger, often left-leaning critics like Hicks and Edmund Wilson.[97][98] Despite this critical opposition to her work, Cather remained a popular writer whose novels and short story collections continued to sell well; in 1931 Shadows on the Rock was the most widely read novel in the United States, and Lucy Gayheart became a bestseller in 1935.[19]
Although Cather made her last trip to Red Cloud in 1931 for a family gathering after her mother's death, she stayed in touch with her Red Cloud friends and sent money to Annie Pavelka and other families during the Depression years.[28]: 327 In 1932, Cather published Obscure Destinies, her final collection of short fiction, which contained "Neighbour Rosicky", one of her most highly regarded stories. That same summer, she moved into a new apartment on Park Avenue with Edith Lewis, and during a visit on Grand Manan, she probably began working on her next novel, Lucy Gayheart.[99][E] She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1934.[118]
Cather suffered two devastating losses in 1938.[119][120][121] In June, her favorite brother, Douglass, died of a heart attack. Cather was too grief-stricken to attend the funeral.[29]: 478 Four months later, Isabelle McClung died. Cather and McClung had lived together when Cather first arrived in Pittsburgh, and while McClung eventually married and moved with her husband to Toronto,[122] the two women remained devoted friends.[123][124][F] Cather wrote that Isabelle was the person for whom she wrote all her books.[127]
Final years
During the summer of 1940, Cather and Lewis went to Grand Manan for the last time, and Cather finished her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a book much darker in tone and subject matter than her previous works.[29]: 483 [128] While Sapphira is understood by readers as lacking a moral sense and failing to evoke empathy,[129] the novel was a great critical and commercial success, with an advance printing of 25,000 copies.[81] It was then adopted by the Book of the Month Club,[130] which bought more than 200,000 copies.[131] Her final story, "The Best Years",[132] intended as a gift for her brother,[133] was retrospective. It contained images or "keepsakes" from each of her twelve published novels and the short stories in Obscure Destinies.[134]
Although an inflamed tendon in her hand hampered her writing, Cather managed to finish a substantial part of a novel set in Avignon, France. She had titled it Hard Punishments and placed it in the 14th century during the reign of Antipope Benedict XIV.[28]: 371 She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943.[135] The same year, she executed a will that prohibited the publication of her letters and dramatization of her works.[126] In 1944, she received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, a prestigious award given for an author's total accomplishments.[136]
Cather was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 1945 and underwent a mastectomy on January 14, 1946.[137]: 294–295 By early 1947, her cancer had metastasized to her liver, becoming stage IV cancer.[137]: 296 On April 24, 1947, Cather died of a cerebral hemorrhage, at the age of 73, in her home at 570 Park Avenue in Manhattan.[138][139] After Cather's death, Edith Lewis destroyed the manuscript of Hard Punishments according to Cather's instructions.[140] She is buried at the southwest corner of Jaffrey, New Hampshire's Old Burying Ground,[141][142][143] a place she first visited when joining Isabelle McClung and her husband, violinist Jan Hambourg,[144] at the Shattuck Inn.[145][146] Lewis was buried alongside Cather some 25 years later.[147]
