Born in Virginia, Willa Cather was nine years old when she moved with her family to Red Cloud, Nebraska. After graduating from the University of Nebraska in 1895, she took a job at a magazine in Pittsburgh. Cather also taught and worked for a newspaper before she published her first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden, in 1905. Three years later, she became managing editor of McClure’s Magazine in New York City, where she lived for the rest of her life. Cather left McClure’s in 1912 to devote her time to writing fiction. Her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, which focused on city life, was published that year. Her novel O Pioneers!, published the next year, portrayed frontier life on the Great Plains. In 1918 Cather wrote My Antonia, which was also about life on the frontier. Cather won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922 for One of Ours. Her other novels include Song of the Lark (1915) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).
