The Professor's House

Willa Cather was born in Virginia in 1873 and moved to the frontier territory of Nebraska when she was nine years old. Many of her best-known novels, particularly O, Pioneers! (1913), Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918), reflect the experience of immigration and frontier culture, emphasizing human resilience in a beautiful, but unforgiving setting. Her novel One of Ours (1922) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.

As a teenager in Red Cloud, Nebraska, Cather aspired to become a doctor and experimented with gender presentation, cutting her hair short and briefly signing her name as “William.” Many of her works, including The Professor’s House, explore the possibilities of intimacy beyond conventional heterosexuality. She began writing professionally while a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and, after graduation, worked as an editor in Pittsburgh. In 1906, she moved to New York City to take a job as an editor at McClure’s magazine, where she met Edith Lewis, who would become her lifelong companion and literary executor. Scholars continue to debate how Cather understood her sexuality within the context of her time; although her closest adult relationships were with other women, many of her protagonists and narrators are male.

Cather enjoyed a great deal of commercial and critical success in the 1910s and 1920s with her novels about the Great Plains. By the 1930s, however, her work began to attract criticism for presenting too romanticized a view of frontier life, evading contemporary issues, and reflecting their author’s markedly conservative values. She published her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, in 1940, and passed away of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1947.