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An Immense Career Career Willa Cather, American novelist and short-story writer, was born Willela Sibert Cather on 7 December 1873, in Back Creek Valley, Virginia, near Winchester. At nine years of age, in 1883, her family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska. Many of her novels were set in Red Cloud. She attended the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and graduated in 1895. She spent a few years after college working on a newspaper, and then worked an editorial job at the magazine Home Monthly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She then wrote reviews for the Pittsburgh Leader. In 1903, she published a book of poetry, April Twilights, and she moved to New York City in 1904. She met Edith Lewis the same year, whom she later shares an apartment …show more content…

Cather worked careers as a journalist, an editor, and a fiction writer - but her first publication was a poetry collection, April Twilights (1903). But she is not recognized as a 'Poet' in any historical career escalation reference. That is, out of all my research, none of it identifies her as a poet, yet she was first recognized for writing a poetry collection. Actually, Cather herself declines to regard poetry of any practical value, that poetry holds no material means, as well art in general, that evolves mainly for the release of the artist. She sharply acknowledges that all art holds, instead of any practical value, native and abstract values. But all art does indeed hold value. Therefore, no other writer likely considers her a signature poet since she does not hold poetry of any material value; obviously, in her rationale, poetry marks the artistic extreme of any writing she's done. (Ahearn) Regardless, after her debut poetry collection, she published a short story collection, The Troll Garden in 1905. After this short story collection, she edited McClure's magazine in New York, eventually to become the managing editor, until 1912. She left the magazine, in fact, with encouragement from coworkers to focus her wisdom solely on a novelist career. But her first "important writing," according to George Seibel, former critic and head of the Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny, was

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