Willa Cather, 1874 - 1947

I have two bricks in my office, two bricks I dug up from a desolate spot on the prairie, the homestead where Willa Cather's family first put down roots in Webster County, far south central Nebraska, just a dozen miles north of the Republican River. The town in which she grew up--her father was in insurance and real estate--was Red Cloud, a town that has little going for it these days other than its being the home of one of the nation's finest novelists.

I've been to Red Cloud often. I used to take classes every other year, in fact, a gruelling marathon of travel that started about five in the morning and didn't end, back home, until midnight. No matter how long it took, students always loved the trip.

I have Cather to thank, I believe, for my deep respect for the Great Plains. My Antonia will always be one of my favorite novels, in great part because Ms. Cather creates a character in that novel, Antonia herself, whose epic strength and courage make her one of the most memorable literary heroes--or heroines--of all time. Tony Shimerda, looms over that wide open landscape of that novel like some behomoth cottonwood.

Twenty miles north of Red Cloud, you can still walk around the deserted homestead where the prototype for Tony Shimerda lived. In a sweet moment late in the novel, when the narrator, Jim, visits, Tony's children come bounding out of a storm cellar not far from the back door of Tony's farm home. Often, my students would pose, like this, sitting on the door to that old storm cellar.

Just driving through the stark and open prairie of the Divide, where Cather both literally and figuratively grew up, is, today, still like entering her world, the place where she found the greatest inspiration of her lifetime. "It was over flat lands like this, stretching out to drink the sun, that the larks sang— and one's heart sang there too," she wrote in The Song of the Lark.

Willa Cather will never be just a novelist to me because what she did in her writing is evoke an entire world and dress it forever in the exacting livery of time and place with such accuracy that she, paradoxically, gave it away to all of us, wherever we left our own childhoods. She will always be, to me anyway, Red Cloud, the small town amid the prairie's red grass hills. Willa Cather could leave Nebraska, and did so frequently during her lifetime; but the plains she loved never left her. They not only found a place what she wrote--they were themselves her finest work. Even in Death Comes for the Archbishop, a New Mexico novel some consider her best, the Great Plains are there, outfitted in dusty, desert camouflage.

It's her birthday today, born in 1873. If I had my druthers, I'd climb into some stout winter clothes, grab a couple of students, and head west and south right now to see her world this afternoon, adorned in its first snow. But I don't; another trip will have to wait for another day.

I'll just have to dust off those old homestead bricks.

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