Cather's first novel was published in 1912 and was called Alexander's Bridge. In 1913 came O Pioneers! which took its title from a poem by Walt Whitman. My Antonia, published in 1918, is probably her best known work, and features the hardy, sensitive women who led courageous, simple lives of endurance in the harshly beautiful wilderness. These immigrants would become the mothers of a new race of Americans, and the book spans the few generations that saw the prairie transformed into modern farmland and cities.

In 1927, Willa Cather wrote what is considered her best work, Death Comes for the Archbishop, about missionary priests in New Mexico. In 1923, she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, the story of an American farmer who dies in battle in World War I.

Like the narrator in My Antonia, Willa Cather was born in Virginia, the oldest child in an Irish family, and moved to Ne

Like her protagonist, Cather grew up among European immigrants and enjoyed the simple pleasures of a rural childhood, like giving plays. Willa Cather had an interest in medicine and a lifelong love of music and theater. One of her books, Song of the Lark, was about a frontier girl who becomes a great opera singer.

Again, like her narrator in My Antonia, Willa Cather graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1895 and went east. She taught English and Latin in high school in Pittsburg while writing poetry and short stories from 1901 to 1906. Later, in New York, she joined the staff of "McClure's Magazine" and became an editor.

Willa Cather traveled to Europe and visited the original homes of her immigrant characters. She was especially fond of Czechoslovakia, which is where the fictional family, the Shimerdas, came from.

Cather never married, and according to one source, she sometimes wore men's clothes and passed as a male doctor, in order to avoid the prejudice against women that was common in society in those days. Though she chose a man as her narrator, My Antonia is more concerned with the lives of the immigrant girls who grew up strong on prairie farms, worked in town to earn their way, and then made lives for themselves in their new country.

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 857
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)