It’s the birthday of the novelist Willa Cather, born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia (1873)…. Her family settled in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and she fell in love with the Nebraska landscape. She wrote, “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth is the floor of the sky.”
She went off to college, got involved in journalism and eventually moved to New York City to edit McClure’s magazine. After living in New York for fifteen years, she quit her job and took a trip back home to Nebraska. Standing on the edge of a wheat field, she watched the first harvest that she had seen since her childhood. When she got back to the East, she began her first great novel, O Pioneers! (1913), about Alexandra Bergson, the oldest daughter of Swedish immigrant farmers, who struggles to work the family farm after her father dies. Cather went on to write many more novels about the westward expansion of the United States, including My ??ntonia (1918), The Professor’s House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).
Willa Cather said, “We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while.”
Source: The Writer’s Almanac.
You may hear Garrison Keillor tell the above and more by clicking here [RealAudio].