Willa CatherWilla Cather on PBS
American Masters “Willa Cather: The Road Is All”Wednesday, September 7, 2005 at 9 -10:30 p.m. ET on PBS
In 1883, the young Willa Cather was plucked from her luxurious home in Virginia and dropped into the vast, tall grass prairies of Nebraska. It was an experience that terrified but exhilarated her, and became the force behind all of her great novels: O Pioneer, The Song of the Lark, My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop and the Pulitzer Prize-winning One of Ours. Her life remains mysterious — she destroyed much of her personal correspondence and insisted upon specific restrictions concerning her work — and seductive, because she ignored every cultural obstacle in her path. She was educated and well-traveled, she smoked and she talked tough, she did not suffer fools and she often dressed like a man. She has been a great inspiration to women writers and a great hero to women readers, rediscovered in every decade for the past 100 years. This program is filmed in widescreen HD, enhancing the beauty of the endless prairie and giving palpable texture to Cather’s writing while bringing the frontier to life, restoring its grandeur, its desolation and this truly American literary genre. David Strathairn narrates. Marcia Gay Harden, an Oscar winner for Pollock, provides the voice of Willa Cather.
