Willa Cather never married. She began living with another woman from Nebraska in nineteen-oh-eight. They lived together until Cather died.

In nineteen twenty-two, Cather suffered a nervous breakdown. A number of things caused her condition. Her health was not good.  She was unhappy with her publisher. And, she was angry about the changes in society brought by new technology.

In nineteen twenty-three, Cather wrote the last of her Nebraska novels, "A Lost Lady." Two years later she produced another novel, "The Professor's House." It was clear by then that she was moving in a different direction.

Her next two novels, "Death Comes for the Archbishop," and "Shadows in the Rock," take place in the distant past. They are stories about heroic failure. "Death Comes for the Archbishop" takes place in the American Southwest in the sixteenth century. It describes the experiences of two priests who are sent to what became New Mexico. The action is in the past. But the place is one that Cather felt always would remain the same -- the deserts of the American Southwest.

Where her earlier books described a person's search for solid ground, these books describe the solid ground itself. They came from a deep unhappiness with modern life.

Although Cather turned away from modern life, she was very much a modern writer. Her writing became increasingly important to a new group of writers -- Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos.

Near the end of her life she wrote: "Nothing really matters but living. Get all you can out of it. I am an old woman, and I know. Sometimes people disappoint us. And sometimes we disappoint ourselves. But the thing is to go right on living."

Willa Cather went right on living until the age of seventy-four.  She died in nineteen forty-seven.