The Simple Home of a Great Writer
Willa Cather House, Red Cloud, Nebraska ca.1878
Willa Cather, the great Nebraska author of such books as O Pioneers!, My Antonia and The Song of the Lark spent her early childhood in this simple and iconic house in Red Cloud, Nebraska. The house, with its sheltering oak and white picket fence is symbolic of small town America. Cather’s experiences growing up in the late 1800’s in Red Cloud and in this house clearly influenced her later writing and her vision of life. This excerpt from The Song of the Lark describes her living room in perfect detail:
“She saw everything clearly in the red light from the isinglass sides of the hard coal burner…the nickel trimmings on the stove itself, the pictures on the wall, which she thought were very beautiful, the flowers on the Brussels carpet.”
Cather was not content to paint an idealistic or rosy picture of life in a small mid-western town on the prairies. But she ennobled her characters in a unique way through her powers of observation and her understanding of the human condition that were in no small part developed as a child growing up in this little house. It is interesting to me that such a simple home produced a writer who addressed such complex and deeply human themes.
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It looks really comfy.