American writer Willa Cather was BOTD in 1873. Born in Gore, Virginia, she grew up in rural Nebraska, a landscape that informed much of her later writing. After graduating from the University of Nebraska, she worked in Pittsburgh as a magazine editor and teacher, moving to New York City in 1896. The following year, she formed a relationship with magazine editor Edith Lewis, who became her life partner. Cather is best known for her writings about American frontier life, notably the novel trilogy O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia, published between 1913 and 1918. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for the war-themed novel One of Ours, followed by successes with the novels Death Comes for the Archbishop, A Lost Lady and The Professor’s House. By the 1930s, she was one of America’s most widely-read novelists in America, with celebrity fans including Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thornton Wilder. As the hardships of the Great Depression became more widespread, critics tired of her idealised accounts of rural life and complained about her lack of social and political engagement. Nonetheless, her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, was a bestseller. Cather died in 1947, aged 73. In her will, she left instructions to destroy her unpublished manuscripts, and prohibited publication of her letters and dramatisations of her novels. Her work was critically reappraised by feminist scholars in the 1970s, and eloquently critiqued by Toni Morrison for racialist stereotyping.