Willa Cather was born in the Back Creek Valley of Virginia, and when she was nine her family moved west to Nebraska, first to a farm and then to the small railroad town of Red Cloud. The move was a shock. In My Ántonia, her narrator remembers arriving to find that there seemed to be nothing but land, “not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” Then it seized her. Her neighbors were immigrant families from Bohemia, Sweden, Norway, Russia and Germany, and she spent hours listening to the older women tell stories of the old country in their own languages.

She went to the University of Nebraska, where she became known for her sharp theater reviews, and then worked as a journalist and teacher in Pittsburgh. In 1906 she moved to New York to work at McClure’s, the magazine that published Ida Tarbell, and soon became its managing editor.

The turning point came from the writer Sarah Orne Jewett, who told her that she must find a quiet place and write about what she knew best: her own country and her own people. Cather left the magazine. O Pioneers! (1913) tells of Alexandra Bergson, a Swedish immigrant’s daughter who tames the prairie. My Ántonia (1918) is narrated by Jim Burden, who looks back from adulthood on the Bohemian girl he grew up beside, and on the hard and beautiful life she made. They are quiet, clear books, almost without plot, and the land itself is one of their main characters.

One of Ours, about a Nebraska farm boy who dies in the First World War, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. She went on to write Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), about two French priests in the New Mexico desert, which many readers think her finest book.

Cather lived in New York for nearly forty years with her companion, Edith Lewis. She guarded her privacy fiercely, destroyed many of her letters and forbade publication of the rest. When the ban was finally lifted, more than sixty years after her death in 1947, readers found the same clear, warm voice as in her novels.