Willa Cather's Virginia Childhood: A Birthday Celebration
Museum of the Shenandoah Valley
901 Amherst Street
Winchester, VA 22601
United States
Though associated with the Great Plains, American author Willa Cather spent much of her childhood in Frederick County, Virginia. In this illustrated presentation taking place on Cather’s birthday, Andrew Jewell, a Cather scholar from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will discuss Cather’s Virginia childhood and detail how it shaped her confident, creative, and independent personality.
This program celebrates Cather's 151st birthday anniversary (December 7, 1873) and is part of a two-year national celebration of the renowned writer's sesquicentennial with the National Willa Cather Center.
Suggested donations of what you can pay (between $2–$10). Register by December 6; sign up online or call 540-662-1473, ext. 240. Admission to the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley also includes access to the museum's galleries and gardens. Walk-ins welcome as space permits.
Presented in partnership with Willa Cather’s Virginia, an organization dedicated to preserving Cather’s birthplace which receives generous support from the Marion Park Lewis Foundation.
Andrew Jewell, a highly respected Willa Cather scholar, is currently writing a biography of Cather. He is co-editor of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (Knopf, 2013), and of the digital, scholarly edition, The Complete Letters of Willa Cather. Professor Jewell is Co-Director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, and Chair of the Libraries' Digital Strategies department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
For further information on the event and the nonprofit Willa Cather’s Virginia, contact Ann Romines at annrom3@verizon.net
About Willa Cather's Virginia
Willa Cather’s Virginia is based in Gore, Virginia, the first home of one of America’s greatest writers. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather (1873-1947) was a fifth generation Virginian, whose relatives aligned on opposing sides of the Civil War. Her fiction, although often set far from Virginia, deals again and again with issues and characters that are deeply involved with Virginia and the South.
Willa Cather was reared amidst the beauty of Back Creek Valley and later embraced the complexities of her Virginia birthplace—including the stories of those who inhabited what she described as “that out-of-the-way, thinly settled district between Romney and Winchester.” Indeed, Cather’s final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), is set near her birthplace just a few miles northwest of Winchester, in the traumatic decade preceding the Civil War. Through the restoration and revitalization of Willa Cather’s Birthplace, Willa Cather’s Virginia aims to widen and deepen members’ and visitors’ understanding of this place: its resources, issues, and stories—past and future.