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Willa Sibert Cather (;〔("Willa Cather" ) in The American Heritage Dictionary.〕 December 7, 1873〔 Cather's birth date is confirmed by a birth certificate and a January 22, 1874, letter of her father's referring to her. While working at ''McClure's Magazine'', Cather claimed to be born in 1875. After 1920, she claimed 1876 as her birth year. That is the date carved into her gravestone at Jaffrey, New Hampshire.〕 – April 24, 1947〔("Willa Cather's Biography." ) (Willa Cather Foundation website. ) Retrieved March 11, 2015.〕) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including ''O Pioneers!'' (1913), ''The Song of the Lark'' (1915), and ''My Ántonia'' (1918). In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for ''One of Ours'' (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Virginia and Nebraska, and graduated from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years.〔("Journalist and Teacher, Writer and Poet, 1895–1912." ) (Willa Cather Foundation website. ) Retrieved April 22, 2013.〕 At the age of 33 she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence in New Brunswick, Canada. ==Early life and education== Cather was born Wilella Sibert Cather in 1873 on her maternal grandmother's farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia (see Willa Cather Birthplace). Her father was Charles Fectigue Cather (d. 1928), whose family had lived on land in the valley for six generations. Cather's family originated in Wales, the family name deriving from Cadair Idris, a mountain range in northwestern Wales. Her mother was Mary Virginia Boak (died 1931), a former school teacher. Within a year of Cather's birth, the family moved to Willow Shade, a Greek Revival-style home on 130 acres given to them by her paternal grandparents. At the urging of Charles Cathers' parents, the family moved to Nebraska in 1883 when Willa was nine years old. The rich, flat farmland appealed to Charles' father, and the family wished to escape the tuberculosis outbreaks that were rampant in Virginia.〔Lee, Hermoine. ''Willa Cather: Double Lives''.NY:Pantheon, 1989, p. 30〕 Willa's father tried his hand at farming for eighteen months; then he 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. Cather's time in the western state, still on the frontier, was a deeply formative experience for her. She was intensely moved by the dramatic environment and weather, the vastness of the Nebraska prairie, and the various cultures of the European-American, immigrant and Native American families in the area.〔 Like Jim Burden in ''My Antonia'' the young Willa Cather saw the Nebraska frontier as a "place where there was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the materials out of which countries were made...Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out".〔Cather, Willa. ''My Antonia''. NY:Mariner Books, 1995, p. 8〕 Mary Cather had six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass, Jessica, James, John, and Elsie. Cather was closer to her brothers than to her sisters whom, according to biographer Hermione Lee, she "seems not to have liked very much." Cather read widely, having made friends with a Jewish couple, the Weiners, who offered her free access to their extensive library.〔Acocella, Joan. ''Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism''. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, p. 7〕 She made house calls with the local physician, Dr. Robert Damerell, and decided to become a doctor.〔Woodress, James. ''Willa Cather: A Literary Life''. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987, p. 52〕 After Cather's essay on Thomas Carlyle was published in the ''Nebraska State Journal'' during her freshman year at the University of Nebraska, she became a regular contributor to the ''Journal''. She changed her plans to major in science and become a physician, instead graduating with a B.A. in English in 1894. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Willa Cather」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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