CATHER, WILLA SIBERT ), American author, was born at Winchester, Va., on Dec. 7, 1876 and as a child of eight or nine was taken to a Nebraska ranch. After her graduation from the University of Nebraska in 1895, she taught English in the Allegheny high-school, worked on the Pittsburgh Leader and travelled widely. Her first volume of stories, The Troll Garden (1905), led to an appointment as associate editor of McClure's Magazine (1906-12), which was then a vigorous periodical, a pioneer in the field of magazine journalism, less dig nified than the old monthlies, but alive with the spirit of reform and direct appeal to an ever increasing audience more interested in substance than in form. Miss Cather's first distinguished work in pure literature was 0 Pioneers! (1913), in which, on Sarah Orne Jewett's advice, she endeavoured to recapture "in memory, people and places" which she believed to be forgotten. With it she put herself in the forefront of those who had begun to realize the importance of pioneer life in America. My Antonia (1918) was another book with the same general background, which es tablished her reputation as a novelist of unusual depth and power of beauty, who could see deep currents of emotion running in those Main Streets and prairies which Sinclair Lewis was to satirize for their decline into dullness. In One of Ours (1922), she stepped aside, not altogether successfully, to tell a story of a Western boy in the World War. This novel was awarded a Pulitzer prize. The Song of the Lark (1915) was another pioneer story; A Lost Lady (1923) was also told against a prairie back ground, but its simplicity of telling, its depth of tragedy and fineness of insight into the secret and the weakness of woman's charm far outweigh the interest of its local colour. In The Pro fessor's House (1925), she began experiments with a new tech nique of story-telling, constructing her story of an intellectual's soul development according to the familiar methods of music. In Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), she told in the form of a chronicle a simple and vivid story of two saints of the South-west. This, A Lost Lady, Shadows on the Rock (1931), and Lucy Gayheart 5) are her best books. Her short stories in the collection Youth and the Bright Medusa (192o), escape the stereotyping that has devitalized so many American short story writers. Her first book was in verse, April Twilights (1903) ; her first novel Alexander's Bridge (1912) .
Among the writers who in the early 20th century have deepened and refined the study of American character, Willa Cather is per haps pre-eminent. Her style is restrained, sometimes almost cold, but rising into passages of great beauty, and always in harmony with her subject. Her themes are broader and more human than Mrs. Wharton's; her analysis of human motives deeper than Tarkington's; and she is perhaps closer to essential Americanism in its spiritual and emotional aspects than any other contemporary writer. She is not rich in humour, nor pointed in satire, and in this differs from her nearest contemporaries, but she comes closest in American literature of this period to the classic ideal of balance, insight, restraint.