In Cather’s junior year of college, she began growing her hair longer and putting the eccentricities of her early university days behind her. In Pittsburgh, she wore more feminine clothing, and, for the first time in her life, she found herself popular. She was invited to join women’s clubs and to attend parties and picnics. She was especially impressed by the museums and concert halls and was happy to be writing prodigiously and earning enough money to support herself. She found it difficult, however, to write magazine copy about the joys of decorating a home and raising children.
When the Home Monthly was sold about a year later, Cather resigned and began working on the telegraph desk of the Pittsburgh Leader, writing dramatic and musical criticism; she sent the latter back to the Journal, in Lincoln. The Leader also ran several of her short stories, some under her own name and some under a pseudonym.
Cather’s new lifestyle soon began wearing on her. Because many of her columns ran 3,000 to 4,000 words, she was often exhausted. In addition, she was living in cheap boarding houses and eating sparingly and inexpensively so she could send money home to her parents.
While spending a week in New York in 1899, she met Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a wealthy and prominent Pittsburgh judge; this meeting was the beginning of a deep friendship that would last a lifetime. Isabelle admired Cather, who was already a celebrity in town, and the two women shared many of the same interests—theater, music, and art. Not only did Isabelle encourage Cather to write, but, in 1901, she remodeled a third-floor sewing room in the family home as a study for her friend. Cather was delighted and moved into the McClung home.
Launching a short-lived career as a high school instructor, Cather began teaching Latin, algebra, and English at Pittsburgh’s Central High School; the following year, she became a full-time English teacher. For a while, she also taught American literature at Allegheny High School.
In the summer of 1902, accompanied by Isabelle, Cather visited Europe for the first time. During their travels, she sent back newspaper articles for the Nebraska State Journal to help finance the trip.
In 1903, Cather published a collection of poems, April Twilights, and followed it with a collection of short stories, The Troll Garden, in 1905. In 1906, she moved to New York as a staffer for McClure’s Magazine and, in 1908, became the magazine’s managing editor. She had ambivalent feelings about her work at McClure’s. She was thrilled to be working with manuscripts written by some of the world’s finest writers—such luminaries as Mark Twain, Kipling, and Conan Doyle—but McClure’s was increasingly turning to nonfiction, and Cather grew impatient with editing amateurishly written articles on subjects about which she had little interest.
One of these poorly written pieces was a manuscript about Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science religion. The manuscript was riddled with factual errors and so badly organized that Cather knew she would have to completely rewrite it. To do this, she had to rent an apartment in Boston to use as a home base while she traveled around New England checking facts.
In Boston, Cather met Sarah Orne Jewett, a writer from Maine, who would become a major influence in Cather’s life. Jewett advised Cather to give up journalism and concentrate on writing fiction, but it wasn’t until after the publication of Alexander’s Bridge in 1912 that Cather was confident enough to leave her job at McClure’s and begin writing full-time. She was later critical of Alexander’s Bridge, calling it imitative and contrived, and perhaps this is one reason why, with her next novel, she followed Jewett’s suggestion and drew on her own background and experiences. The result, O Pioneers! (1913), became Cather’s first novel about life on the Nebraska prairie.
In 1908, Cather took a small apartment with Edith Lewis (whom she’d first met in Lincoln in 1903) on Washington Place in New York City. Five years later, the two women moved into an attractive seven-room apartment at 5 Bank Street, in Greenwich Village, where they would reside for fifteen years. These would be Cather’s happiest and most productive years.
