At the same time, however, she also discovered that her very being was rooted in the landscape of her childhood. Like Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark, Cather knew she would never find fulfillment unless she left her home. She knew that she had to leave the prairie in order to fulfill her compelling desire for broader experiences and for art. As long as her parents were alive, she made repeated trips back home to see them, and each time she crossed the Missouri River, she said, “the very smell of the soil tore to pieces.” As a young woman in Red Cloud and Lincoln, however, she was chafed by narrow attitudes and limited opportunities. That ambivalence is the central tension in her novels. That statement reveals the ambivalence in Cather that produced in her a lifelong tug-of-war between the East and the western prairie. She once said in an interview that the Nebraska landscape was “the happiness and the curse” of her life. Willa Cather (1873-1947) was a prolific American novelist noted for her portrayals of the settlers and frontier life on the American plains.
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