Willa Cather's Nebraska

Nebraska produced one of the most important novelists in the history of American literature. Willa Cather was nine years old when her family moved from Virginia to a farm south of Red Cloud in Webster County, in eighteen eighty-three. The landscape nearly broke her. She wrote later that the flat, windswept prairie stripped away everything familiar and left her exposed to a sky that seemed too large for a child to make sense of.

She recovered by paying attention. The immigrant families around Red Cloud, Czech and Swedish and Russian and German, became her subject. Their struggles to carry European culture into an environment that had no precedent for it, their stubbornness and their losses and their rootedness in land that had asked everything of them, filled the novels she eventually wrote.

My Antonia, published in nineteen eighteen, is the work for which she is best remembered, a portrait of a Bohemian immigrant woman moving through girlhood, hardship, and a rooted life on the Nebraska land. The novel's narrator, Jim Burden, looks back from middle age and understands that the formative experience of his life happened in a place most people would have called empty.

Cather won the Pulitzer Prize in nineteen twenty-three. She died in New York in nineteen forty-seven, but the novels she wrote belong to a specific stretch of south-central Nebraska prairie that she never entirely left. The Willa Cather Foundation in Red Cloud preserves the sites from her childhood and her fiction. You can walk through them and understand that the plains are not an absence. They are a terrain that, if you stay long enough, becomes a literature.