F. Scott Fitzgerald lamented that The Great Gatsby couldn’t hold a candle to her books. In 1938, Sinclair Lewis called her the greatest living American novelist. The U.S. Post Office once put her face on a commemorative stamp. If you read any literary essay about the American Catholic novel, you’ll see her Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock listed prominently—and she wasn’t even Catholic. But Willa Cather found no fans more enthusiastic of her writings over the years than America’s editors and contributors.
From the first mention of Cather upon her publication of One of Ours in 1923 to a scripture reflection by the Rev. Terrance Klein just five months ago, America’s writers have been praising and recommending Cather’s prose for more than a century. Why? In part, it is because few else have ever captured in fiction the American religious sense that underlies so much of our history.
Born near Winchester, Va., in 1873, Cather moved to Nebraska with her family (she was one of seven children) in 1883, eventually settling in Red Cloud, Neb. She graduated high school at 16 and enrolled in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the state’s capitol. After graduation, she moved to Pittsburgh, Pa., working as a writer for a women’s magazine and later as a schoolteacher in Pittsburgh and nearby Allegheny, Pa.
She published a collection of poems, April Twilights, in 1903, followed by a book of short stories two years later, The Troll Garden. In 1906 she moved to New York City after being offered a position at McClure’s Magazine that year. (When America was founded in 1909 at 32 Washington Square West in New York City, Cather—at 60 Washington Square South—was a close neighbor.) McClure’s serialized her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, in 1912. She followed that up with her “Prairie Trilogy,” three novels set in the Great Plains: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia, all published between 1913 and 1918. In 1923, Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel of World War I.
Four years later, she published Death Comes for the Archbishop, a commercial hit that was also soon recognized as a classic of American fiction. The book is a fictionalized account of a Catholic bishop, Jean-Marie Latour (based on Bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy; readers may remember Paul Horgan’s Lamy of Santa Fe, a biography that won Horgan his second Pulitzer Prize in 1976), who travels with his friend and fellow priest to the deserts of New Mexico to take up duties as the archbishop of Santa Fe.
“Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald all hold honored places in American fiction, but when it comes to the topography of the desert soul, no one surveys it better than Cather,” wrote Doris Donnelly of the book in an essay for America in 2000. “What Georgia O’Keefe does on canvas, Willa Cather does on paper: She understands the pace of the desert, its seduction and its unforgiving but quintessentially beautiful landscape.”
The book—and Cather’s later Shadows on the Rock, about a young woman in French Catholic Quebec in the late 1600s—seemed so thoroughly Catholic in its sacramental themes and carefully fair treatment of clergy (who were often treated as mawkish or sinister characters in literature of the time) that a 1931 reviewer for America included Cather in a list of prominent Catholic writers “attaining to the ranks of best sellers,” apparently unaware that Cather was Protestant her entire life. Later that year, editor Francis Talbot, S.J., noted that the “more intelligent Catholic press accepted the story enthusiastically, though with slight reservations.” Others, he wrote, “seemed offended as much by the fact that Miss Cather, not being a Catholic, dared to presume to write a Catholic book as by the fact that she did not make every Catholic character a saint.”
Almost a century later, America editor James Martin, S.J., wrote of Death Comes for the Archbishop that “Of all Cather’s books, this is the work that is most like a prayer, and her compassionate telling of the bishop’s joys and heartaches is a profound meditation on a life devoted to God, and a near-perfect evocation of a person who has found a vocation. And, frankly, no one can write a sentence like Willa Cather, one of the greatest American novelists.”
Cather published three other novels that decade, including My Mortal Enemy, A Lost Lady and The Professor’s House. Shadows on the Rock and Lucy Gayheart followed in the 1930s, with Cather’s last finished novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, coming out in 1940. She also published numerous books of poetry, short stories and prose non-fiction.
Cather’s reputation suffered a bit in the decades after her peak in the 1920s and 30s, in part because her fiction was sometimes characterized as too staid and careful; though One of Ours had been widely acclaimed upon its release, for example, famous writers later derided its scenes of war as clichéd and overly romanticized, including Ernest Hemingway, H.L. Mencken and Edmund Wilson. However, her “Prairie Trilogy” has retained a strong following, and books like Death Comes for the Archbishop became a staple in many literature courses around the nation.
Though Cather never married and lived for many years with a female partner, her fiction and her letters offer little suggestion about her own sexual orientation. In fact, she seems not to have had much use for romance in general. “Life is too short for love anyway, one is a fool to be an exile,” she wrote to a friend in college. Years later, shortly before her death, she wrote in another letter:
Now I know that nothing really matters to us but the people we love. Of course, if we realized that when we were young and just sat down and loved each other the beds would not get made and very little of the world’s work ever get done.
In an essay on Willa Cather and St. Thérèse of Lisieux in 1973 (both had been born a century earlier), America editor John W. Donohue, S.J., claimed the writer and the French Carmelite saint and mystic had more in common than one might think:
In her own way, each reminds us with radiant force that life is made understandable and manageable by great ideals. For ideals, as Willa Cather once said, ‘are not archaic things, beautiful and impotent.’ They are ‘the real sources of power among men.’”
Cather died in New York City in 1947 of a cerebral hemorrhage. Writing of her passing in America, literary editor Harold Gardiner, S.J., who knew his way around novels and religion both, commented in the magazine that “Her death has removed from the American literary scene something we can sorely afford to lose—a truly modern, a truly Christian novelist.”
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Gibbous Moon,” by Alfred Nicol. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
