文档介绍：1Chapter 1 Introduction A Brief Introduction to Willa Cather Just as Frederick Turner observes, “Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development”(1986: 1). Willa Cather (1873-1947), one of the most significant American writers in the first half of the 20th century, gains her reputation mainly from the description of immigrant life on Midwest frontier in her novels. The Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis, when lecturing in Omaha in 1920, said that “Miss Cather is Nebraska’s foremost citizen. The United States knows Nebraska because of Willa Cather”(qtd. in Sergeant, 1992: 177). Cather was born on December 7, 1873 in Back Creek Valley, Virginia, and spent her first nine years in fortable house at Willow Shade. In 1883, the family decided to join Willa’s grandparents and her uncle in Nebraska Divide. This move uprooted little Cather from the shady and mountainous beauty of Virginia to a raw land where “there was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which the countries are made”(MA, 36). This is cruel to a child, but this experience influenced her greatly and made her e a nature lover. At first she was dying for Virginia, but soon she fortable on the prairie, as its vastness gave her a sense of freedom. Her deep love for the Nebraska prairie lasted a life-long time. Eighteen months later, the family moved to Red Cloud, a nearby railway town because Cather’s father did not want to run a farm and found a job in a real estate and loan office. In 1888, the fourteen-year-old Cather decided to e “the hero of her own life story”(O’Brien, 1987: 96), naming herself “William Cather”. She cropped her hair, and wore boyish clothes. She did not want to be female, and even despised female qualities. In fact, she was experiencing