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- Virago
- Virago
Virago Modern Classics, Biography: literary, Prose: non-fiction
Now in B format.
A masterly biography of one of America's most important 20th-century writers, written by Hermione Lee
Willa Cather is one of America's foremost 20th-centry writers. Born in Virginia in 1873, she was uprooted from the landscape her family had farmed for generations, to Nebraska. The startling transition from ordered life in Virginia to the wild west prairies stirred her imagination and coloured her life and work, leading to the two most famous frontier novels: MY ANTONIA and O PIONEERS! After graduating, she worked as a teacher and journalist, and in 1912 she began to write short stories and novels, winning the Pulitzer Prize just ten years later. Travelling beneath the apparently simple surface of Cather's work, Lee presents an illuminating picture of this fascinating writer.
Praise for Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up
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'Willa Cather could not have hoped for a more passionately sensible and insightful interpreter . . . Hermione Lee's enthusiasm for this misunderstood writer is contagious and her book is that rare thing, a scholarly study that reads well' Maureen Freely, Observer
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'The biographer's enthusiasm for her subject illuminates every page' Hilary Mantel
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'A sympathetic and illuminating study' Nicci Gerrard, New Statesman
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'An affectionate, meticulous study, at once intimate and impersonal' OBSERVER
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'An authoritative account . . . Absorbing reading, [written with] wit and energy' GUARDIAN
Hermoine Lee
Hermione Lee (1948) grew up in London and was educated at Oxford. She began her academic career as a lecturer at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va (Instructor, 1970-1971) and at Liverpool University (Lecturer, 1971-1977). She taught at the University of York from 1977, where over twenty years she was Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader, and Professor of English Literature.
From 1998-2008 she was the Goldsmiths' Chair of English Literature and Fellow of New College at the University of Oxford. In 2008, Lee was elected President of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Lee is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's and St Cross Colleges, Oxford. In 2003, she was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) for Services to Literature.
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