American Masters "Willa Cather: The Road is All"

She had riveting blue eyes and a deep voice. She smoked cigarettes and talked tough. And she wrote unforgettable fiction. AMERICAN MASTERS "Willa Cather: The Road Is All" tells the story of a woman who invented herself from scratch. As a child Cather was taken from her comfortable home in Virginia into the wild Nebraska frontier - a place so vast and empty she felt "erased." Cather survived and even thrived on the plains, eventually pioneering her way east to New York City where she wrote her great novels: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop and the Pulitzer Prize-winning One of Ours. "Willa Cather: The Road Is All" is a story of the transforming power of art.

The film premieres on PBS Wednesday, September 7, 2005. Check local listings. Actor David Strathairn narrates. Actress Marcia Gay Harden, an Oscar winner for Pollock, is the voice of Cather.

"Willa Cather's life was a wild, fascinating adventure," says Susan Lacy, creator and executive producer of AMERICAN MASTERS, which has won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Primetime Non-Fiction Series for five of the last six years. "She focused completely on her work and goals. She was relentless. Willa didn't want to be just one of the best American women writers - she wanted to be one of the best American writers. And she was."

Using interviews and rare photographs, and bringing scenes from Cather's novels to life in HD cinematography, the AMERICAN MASTERS film describes what it was like to be a woman on the frontier. Says director Joel Geyer, "She tells stories about the courage and vision it takes to survive when the past is no guide to the future. And there's never a better time than now to tell that story."

Cather was 10 when her family moved to a dugout on the Nebraska prairie, marking the transforming experience of her life. "That shaggy grass country had ripped me with a passion I have never been able to shake," Cather wrote. "It has been the happiness and the curse of my life."

From Red Cloud, Nebraska, which served as the model for all of the small towns in her novels and stories, Cather traveled to Pittsburgh, Europe and New York. Later on, trying to find the frontier of her imagination, she ventured to Arizona and New Mexico. For 35 years, she lived in Greenwich Village with Edith Lewis, a magazine editor. Cather said the neighborhood, with its poor, immigrant population, reminded her of Nebraska.

"The Road Is All" tells an essential part of Cather's story through dramatic re-enactments of scenes from her most famous novels. Death Comes for the Archbishop is the story of the missionary priests of Santa Fe, while Song of the Lark concerns an opera singer who finds her voice in a canyon in New Mexico.

The most important friendship of Cather's life began in Pittsburgh when she met a young woman named Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a judge. Cather later professed that she wrote all of her books for McClung, but since both women burned their letters, the exact nature of their relationship is a mystery.

Cather worked as editor of McClure's magazine in New York City and was nearly 40 before she published her first novel, O Pioneers!, a story of an immigrant's struggle to save her Nebraska farm. Subsequent books sold well, and readers embraced her.

Rare silent footage from 1925, seen for the first time in "The Road Is All," shows Cather at New York's Algonquin Hotel, sitting comfortably alongside such celebrity writers as Sinclair Lewis, George G. Nathan and H.L. Mencken. But in a few years, in an essay called The Case Against Willa Cather, the writer was accused of turning her back on the problems of modern civilization and surrendering to "the heroic idealism of the frontier." Ernest Hemingway charged her with stealing battle scenes from the movies for One of Ours, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Despite her critics, Cather became a literary phenomenon: one of the few American writers who was both a great talent and a popular success. She appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and Good Housekeeping named her one of the 12 greatest women in America. In 1934, Barbara Stanwyck starred in a film adaptation of her novel A Lost Lady.

Nonetheless, Cather became increasingly reclusive, sharing her secrets with only a few she trusted. One by one, those closest to her died. However, she continued to write. "The end is nothing," she wrote. "The road is all." The story of her life is found in the pages of her books.

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