Willa Cather

Born in Virginia, she was uprooted at nine to the raw Nebraska prairie town of Red Cloud, an immigrant-crowded landscape of Bohemian and Scandinavian homesteaders that supplied her fiction's entire emotional geography for the rest of her life. She worked her way to New York as a magazine editor, running McClure's for several years before quitting at forty to write novels full time.

She lived for nearly forty years with her partner, the editor Edith Lewis, largely out of the public eye; unusually for a writer of her stature, she forbade the publication of her personal letters in her will, a ban lifted only decades after her death. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours, a World War I novel that has since been overshadowed by the prairie books surrounding it.