VOICE TWO:

In nineteen twelve Willa Cather published her first novel, “Alexander's Bridge.” By that time, Cather had enough faith in herself to leave magazine work and use all her time to write fiction. She remembered Jewett's advice and turned to the land and people she knew best, the farmers of the Middle West.

In Red Cloud she had lived among Bohemians, French-Canadians, Germans, Scandinavians, and other immigrants. She saw that the mixture of all these new Americans produced a new society.

"There was nothing but land," she wrote. "Not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made." It was this material she used to create her books.

VOICE ONE:

Like all good writers, she wanted her novels to show the world she described, not just tell about it. Later in her life, she described the way she wrote. She called it "novels without furniture." What she meant was that she removed from her novels everything that was not necessary to tell the story. Fiction in the nineteenth century was filled with social detail. It had pages of description and comments by the author. Cather did not write this way. She looked to the past for her ideas, but she drew from the present for her art.

A year after “Alexander's Bridge,” Cather published her second novel. It was the first of her books to take place in the Middle West. It is called “O Pioneers.” It established her as one of the best writers of her time.

“O Pioneers” tells the story of the first small groups of Bohemians, Czechs, French, Russians, and Swedes who set about to conquer the land. Cather said they acted as if they were a natural force, as strong or stronger than Nature. She said they were people who owned the land for a little while because they loved it.

"Spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring," Cather wrote. "Always the same field...trees...lives."

VOICE TWO:

Cather's heroes are pioneers, settlers of unknown or unclaimed land. They also are pioneers of the human spirit.

They are, Cather said, the people who would dream great railroads across the continent. Yet she saw something more in them. It was something permanent within a world of continuous change. A sense of order in what appeared to be disorder.

In Cather's mind, her writings about the Middle West, her prairie years, became a way to show approval of the victory of traditional values against countless difficulties. The fight to remain human and in love with life in spite of everything gives the people in her stories purpose and calm.

VOICE ONE:

Willa Cather continued to write about these new pioneers in “The Song of the Lark” in nineteen fifteen. She followed that with the novel that many consider her best, “My Antonia.”

By the nineteen twenties, however, her stories began to change. She saw more defeats, fewer victories. She began to write -- not about great dreams -- but about the smallness of man's vision. She mourned for the loss of values others would never miss.

Willa Cather never married. She began living with another woman from Nebraska in nineteen-oh-eight. They lived together until Cather died.

In nineteen twenty-two, Cather suffered a nervous breakdown. A number of things caused her condition. Her health was not good. She was unhappy with her publisher. And, she was angry about the changes in society brought by new technology.

In nineteen twenty-three, Cather wrote the last of her Nebraska novels, “A Lost Lady.” Two years later she produced another novel, “The Professor's House.” It was clear by then that she was moving in a different direction.

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VOICE TWO:

Her next two novels, “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” and “Shadows in the Rock,” take place in the distant past. They are stories about heroic failure. “Death Comes for the Archbishop” takes place in the American Southwest in the sixteenth century. It describes the experiences of two priests who are sent to what became New Mexico. The action is in the past. But the place is one that Cather felt always would remain the same -- the deserts of the American Southwest.

Where her earlier books described a person's search for solid ground, these books describe the solid ground itself. They came from a deep unhappiness with modern life.

VOICE ONE:

Although Cather turned away from modern life, she was very much a modern writer. Her writing became increasingly important to a new group of writers -- Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos.

Near the end of her life she wrote: "Nothing really matters but living. Get all you can out of it. I am an old woman, and I know. Sometimes people disappoint us. And sometimes we disappoint ourselves. But the thing is to go right on living."

Willa Cather went right on living until the age of seventy-four. She died in nineteen forty-seven.

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VOICE TWO:

This Special English program was written by Richard Thorman. I'm Tony Riggs.

VOICE ONE:

And I'm Shirley Griffith. Join us again next week for another People in America program on the Voice of America.