In 1903, she published her first book of poems, April Twilight. In any event, Cather never married and never had children. Speculation abounds as to the relationships between Cather and Lewis, but the intensely private Cather left no clues to substantiate or refute claims that Cather was a lesbian. For the remainder of her life, Cather shared a home with Edith Lewis. She would stay with the McClungs between her travels until 1915, when Isabelle married a concert violinist. In Pittsburgh, Cather boarded with the wealthy family of her close friend and rumored lover, Isabelle McClung. In 1901, she began teaching Latin and English at Allegheny High School in Pittsburgh. The following year, she went to work at the Pittsburgh Daily Leader. In 1896, she was appointed managing editor of the Home Monthly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The experience served as Cather's inauguration into the writing vocation. Although medicine was her stated career goal, one of her teachers submitted a Cather essay on Thomas Carlyle to the local newspaper. As a student, Cather wrote stories, poems, plays, and drama and music criticism.

In the early 1890s, she attended the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and graduated in 1895. Aspiring to be a doctor, Cather followed the town physician on his rounds and assisted him as necessary, going so far as to administer ether to a patient receiving an amputation. In addition, she took Latin and Greek lessons from an English immigrant and music lessons from a Norwegian woman.Īmong her many interests as a young woman was science. Her father moved the family from the homestead farm to the town of Red Cloud, where he pursued a career in insurance.Īlthough Red Cloud could claim only 2,500 inhabitants, Cather received a public education as well as the benefit of her German neighbor's extensive library. The family traveled west by train to homestead in Webster County. The combination of unsuccessful sheep farming and a family history of tuberculosis prompted the family to move nine years later to Nebraska.

Her family had emigrated to the United States shortly after the Revolutionary War from Ireland by way of Wales. She was the first of seven children born to Charles F. Willa Cather was born in Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia, on December 7, 1873. Full Glossary for Death Comes for the Archbishop.Death Comes for the Archbishop as a Catholic Novel.Major Themes in Death Comes for the Archbishop.Jacinto, Eusabio, Benito, and Manuelito.Philomene, Magdalena, and Inez Olivares.Padre Gallegos, Fray Baltazar Montoya, Padre Marino Lucero, and Antonio Joseph Martinez.

Willa cather death