Willa Cather - 1873-1947
In 1896, Cather moved to Pittsburgh after being hired to write for the Home Monthly, a women's magazine patterned after the successful Ladies' Home Journal. A year later, she became a telegraph editor and drama critic for the Pittsburgh Leader and frequently contributed poetry and short fiction to The Library, another local publication. In Pittsburgh, she taught Latin, algebra, and English composition at Central High School for one year; she then taught English and Latin at Allegheny High School, where she became the head of the English department.
During her first year in Pittsburgh, Cather also wrote a number of short stories, including "Tommy, the Unsentimental," about a Nebraskan girl with a boy's name, who looks like a boy and saves her father's bank business. Janis P. Stout calls this story one of several Cather works that "demonstrate the speciousness of rigid gender roles and give favorable treatment to characters who undermine conventions."
"The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers ... I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep."
— Willa Cather, My Antonia[
Cather's first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden, was published in 1905 by McClure, Phillips, and Company. It contains several of Cather's best-known stories—"A Wagner Matinee," "The Sculptor's Funeral," and "Paul's Case."
In 1906 Cather moved to New York City after being offered a position on the editorial staff of McClure's Magazine, a periodical connected with the publisher of The Troll Garden the year before. During her first year at McClure's, she wrote a critical biography of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, although Georgine Milmine, a freelance researcher, was named as the sole author. Milmine had performed copious amounts of research, but she did not have the resources to produce a manuscript on her own. "Mary Baker G. Eddy: The Story of Her Life and the History of Christian Science" was published in McClure's in fourteen installments over the next eighteen months, and then in book form as The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1909).
