Marking her December birthday, we explore how Willa Cather’s surroundings shaped her fiction and her place in Nebraska history.
Welcome to From the Archives! I’m Alexis Scargill, Media Archivist here at Nebraska Public Media. Each month, I’ll be highlighting treasures from our collection spanning more than 70 years of broadcast history in our great state.
The World of Willa Cather
We all know December as the “holiday season”—Christmas, Hanukkah, and Festivus for the rest of us—but here in the Nebraska Public Media archives, it’s best known as the birth month of one of our most prominent subjects of documentary—Willa Cather.
Cather was born Dec. 7, 1873 (not in Nebraska - but we don’t need to get into all that). She moved with her family to Red Cloud at age nine and the rest is Great Plains history. Perhaps you’ve read O Pioneers!, My Antonia or Death Comes for the Archbishop. You may be surprised to learn she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for a lesser-known work – One of Ours – in 1923. She was the fifth recipient of this award, and the second woman (in case you participate in trivia night).
I had my full Willa Cather initiation upon receiving a guided tour of Red Cloud (including Cather’s childhood home) from my student worker Jordan Harper at her summer internship at the National Willa Cather Center. While it’s definitely worth the trip, if you don’t find your way to Red Cloud any time soon, we’ve got you covered. Check out some beautiful footage of the community from our 1975 documentary Willa Cather Remembered:
Video from: Willa Cather Remembered, 1975. On top of being informative, it's beautifully shot and scored - and definitely worth a revisit.
Curiosity Created the Writer (not my best)
In my archival travels, something else that stood out about two of Nebraska’s great writers – Mari Sandoz (discussed in last month’s blog post) and Willa Cather – is their shared curiosity. Both writers had a knack for observing the smallest details of the people they encountered and using that to add to the realism of their stories. In Ron Hull’s book Backstage, he shares about Sandoz hanging bags from doorknobs. In these bags, she would keep notes she jotted down of specific details of places or people. She would then pull from the bag when she needed to add a bit of naturalistic detail to her stories. This is a great idea for anyone who has a plastic bag filled with other plastic bags sitting around their kitchen.
Willa Cather, for her part, also drew great inspiration from the people with whom she crossed paths. In this interview, conducted by Mildred Bennett (preeminent Willa Cather scholar and founder of the National Willa Cather Center), Carrie Miner Sherwood shares her recollections of Cather as a child:
Meet the Author; "Mildred Bennett: The World of Willa Cather," 1961
It’s very sweet that Cather had someone like Sherwood to indulge her curiosity. My experience as a highly curious child was more like “I’ll give you $20 if you stop talking for 20 minutes.” (This strategy was how I purchased my first CD - thank you to my grandparents!).
But Wait, There's More!
If all this Willa Cather content has you clamoring for more - be sure to check out:
- Episode four of our series Nebraska’s Historic Places - “Willa Cather’s Home”
- Professor Bernice Slote discussing her book Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir on The Bookshelf
- Singing Cather's Song for more on Mildred Bennett's "spiritual quest" to bring the Willa Cather Center to life
A Festivus Tradition
In closing, and in recognition of Festivus, I’m obligated to share my archivist grievances:
- Unstable humidity
- Metal paper clips
- Rusty staples
- The slow march of time leading to the inevitable decay of magnetic media and film
- Dust
What would you like to see from the archives?
I would love to hear from you. Send me your feedback at fromthearchives@nebraskapublicmedia.org. I’ll be back with more in the New Year!