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Willa Cather was born in Virginia in 1873 and moved to Nebraska, with its wide open plains and immigrant farming communities, at the age of nine. This landscape would deeply affect her later writing. She attended university and became a journalist and teacher in Pittsburgh, and then a magazine editor in New York. Her first major novel, O Pioneers!, appeared in 1913 and was followed by two more in her prairie trilogy, The Song of the Lark and My Antonia, as well as her masterpiece Death Comes for the Archbishop. She lived with the editor Edith Lewis for thirty-nine years until her death in 1947.
A tremendous, ranging story, economical and distilled as poetry -- Jane Gardam Its whole effect works slowly and mysteriously in the reader, and cannot be summed up ... Cather's composed acceptance of mystery is a major, and rare, artistic achievement -- A. S. Byatt Quite simply a masterpiece ... I am completely bowled over by it; by the power of its writing, by the vividness of its scene painting and by the stories it tells ...This is a book which I go on rereading -- A.N. Wilson
