In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I. Willa Cather and her family moved from Virginia to Webster County, Nebraska, when she was nine years old.

Shortly after graduating from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Cather moved to Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher.

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 on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick.

[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.

[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.

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.

[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.

[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.

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.

[63] Cather spent most of 1907 living in Boston, while working at McClure's, writing a series of exposés about the religious leader Mary Baker Eddy, although freelance journalist Georgine Milmine was credited as the author.

[64] A 1993 letter discovered in the Christian Science church archives by Eddy biographer Gillian Gill disclosed that Cather had (perhaps reluctantly) written articles 2 through 14 of the 14-part series.

[65] Milmine had performed copious amounts of research, but she had been unable to produce a manuscript independently, and McClure's employed Cather and a few other editors including Burton J. Hendrick to assist her.

[66] This biography was serialized in McClure's over the next eighteen months and then published in book form as The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (attributed to author Georgina Milmine, only confirmed decades later as really Willa Cather).

[80] 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,[81] and refused to pay for all the illustrations she commissioned for the book from Władysław T.

[83] 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.

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.

[88] By the 1930s, an increasingly large share of critics began to dismiss her as overly romantic and nostalgic, unable to grapple with contemporary issues:[89] Granville Hicks, for instance, charged Cather with escaping into an idealized past to avoid confronting the problems of the present.

[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.

[29]: 483 [133] While Sapphira is understood by readers as lacking a moral sense and failing to evoke empathy,[134] the novel was a great critical and commercial success, with an advance printing of 25,000 copies.

[139] Although an inflamed tendon in her hand hampered her writing, Cather managed to finish a substantial part of a novel set in Avignon, France.

[158] Melissa Homestead has argued that Cather was attracted to Edith Lewis, and in so doing, asked: "What kind of evidence is needed to establish this as a lesbian relationship?

[170] Beginning in 1922, Cather spent summers on the island of Grand Manan in New Brunswick, where she bought a cottage in Whale Cove on the Bay of Fundy.

[179] While Cather enjoyed the novels of several women—including George Eliot,[180] the Brontës, and Jane Austen—she regarded most women writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental.

As a child, she visited immigrant families in her area and returned home in "the most unreasonable state of excitement," feeling that she "had got inside another person's skin.

"[22]: 169–170  After a trip to Red Cloud in 1916, Cather decided to write a novel based on the events in the life of her childhood friend Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a Bohemian girl who became the model for the title character in My Ántonia.

Lewis recalled: "From the first moment that she looked down from the windows of the [Chateau] Frontenac [Hotel] on the pointed roofs and Norman outlines of the town of Quebec, Willa Cather was not merely stirred and charmed—she was overwhelmed by the flood of memories, recognition, surmise it called up; by the sense of its extraordinary French character, isolated and kept intact through hundreds of years, as if by a miracle, on this great un-French continent.

[200] The French influence is found in many other Cather works, including Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and her final, unfinished novel set in Avignon, Hard Punishments.

[201]: 36 [216][217] At the same time, others have sought to place Cather alongside modernists by either pointing to the extreme effects of her apparently simple Romanticism[218] or acknowledging her own "middle ground": She had formed and matured her ideas on art before she wrote a novel.

[219]The English novelist A. S. Byatt has written that with each work Cather reinvented the novel form to investigate the changes in the human condition over time.