October 15, 2009
Washington, DC
Portrait of Willa Cather by Carl Van Vechten, 1936. From Library of Congress collection
Betty Kort is the former executive director of the Willa Cather Foundation. Based in Red Cloud, Nebraska, the foundation is dedicated to preserving and promoting the understanding and appreciation of the life, time, settings, and work of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Kort is also the photographer-curator of Willa Cather and Material Culture, a traveling photography exhibition of select objects important in Cather’s life and work. In this interview excerpt, Kort talks about Cather’s development as a novelist.
The. . . thing I would say about My Ántonia was that everything was an experiment. With O Pioneers! she took a big step in writing about immigrant populations, and no one was doing that. When [Cather] started out, I believe that she thought she probably had to write novels like people on the east coast were writing novels. And they were writing about sophisticated people in sophisticated settings. Her first novel was a novel like that, Alexander’s Bridge, and it was not a particularly successful novel, at least in Cather’s eyes. She had to come home to her roots, to what she knew best, and then she had to have the courage to write about common, ordinary people working the soil, and that took some time. That took some courage. And she also had to figure out a way to do it that would be successful and would compete against what was being written at the time.
Hear more from Kort and others on Willa Cather and her work on The Big Read radio show for My Ántonia. Visit The Big Read calendar to find out where a Big Read celebration of My Ántonia is taking place near you.
Tags: Betty Kort, Big Read radio show, Carl Van Vechten portrait, fiction writing, My Antonia, The Big Read, Willa Cather, Willa Cather Foundation
[...] Willa Cather’s development as a novelist. [...]
Betty was a Cooper Foundation Award winning teacher, the 1993 Nebraska Teacher of the Year, and a Disney Award Teacher (and is featured in “Creativity in the Classroom” a video and handbook created through collaboration between the Disney Learning Partnership and Project Zero at Harvard University). She was employed by the Disney Learning Partnership during the summer for several years. She was the first teacher in Nebraska to be recognized as an NEH Teacher Scholar in 1989, which included a one-year sabbatical. Betty is a recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award, University of Nebraska-Kearney; was a fourteen-year member of the Willa Cather Foundation Board of Governors (serving on the Executive Committee and as vice-president and president of the organization); has been a board member (six years) and president of the Hastings Literacy Program; and has been a presenter on various subjects on numerous occasions on the local, state, and national levels.
Cather is best known for her depictions of frontier life on the Great Plains in novels. A resolutely private person, Cather destroyed many old drafts, personal papers, and letters. This exhibition will be interesting and a must-visit.
In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, published in 1922 …
It will be interesting to see how many of her college-days letters to the Nebraska State Journal survive.