PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
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.
Cather was the first great American novelist to make the West - the real West, not the stuff of pulp fiction - her theme. She makes you see, smell, and feel the prairie * Slate * No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Antonia -- H. L. Mencken One of the warmest, most quietly rousing books that I know; a clear-eyed salute to the resilience of the human spirit and the innate hardiness of the immigrants who came across the ocean to start afresh in the golden west -- Guardian * Xan Brooks *
