Willa Cather American author Willa Sibert Cather is well-known for her Great Plains-set books, such as O Pioneers! The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. Her novel One of Ours, which takes place during World War I, won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. When Willa Cather was nine years old, her family relocated from Virginia to Webster County, Nebraska. Afterwards, the family made Red Cloud, Minnesota, their home. Cather spent ten years in Pittsburgh after earning her degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she worked as a high school English teacher and magazine editor to support herself. She made her lifelong home in New York City when she moved there at the age of 33, though she also traveled extensively and made frequent trips to her summer house on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She lived her final 39 years with Edith Lewis, her domestic partner, before receiving a breast cancer diagnosis and passing away from a brain hemorrhage. Beside her, in a Jaffrey, New Hampshire, plot, lies Lewis. As a novelist of the frontier and pioneer experience, Cather attained prominence.
