Cather’s brother Douglass had taken a job with the Santa Fe Railroad, was stationed in Winslow, Arizona, and, in 1912, Cather visited him. From March to June, she traveled through the Southwest, soaking up the legends and history of its Spanish and Indians peoples, and she would draw on these experiences in The Professor’s House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).
For as long as her family remained in Nebraska, Cather returned to Red Cloud for frequent visits. She loved the prairie and often thought about giving up writing and settling down on a quarter section of land, but always when she was in Nebraska, a sense of loneliness and isolation overwhelmed her and she fled back east.
In 1916, Isabelle McClung married violinist Jan Hambourg. The marriage was as a painful, almost devastating shock to Cather, who disliked change; she felt that she was losing her best friend. In the summer of 1917, the Hambourgs invited her to visit them at the Shattuck Inn in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and Cather stayed there throughout the summer and fall. Working on My Ántonia, the quiet and closeness of nature inspired her, and for many years she continued to work in Jaffrey from mid-September until late November.
Cather’s early years as a full-time writer were plagued by money worries. Sales from her first three novels were meager—My Ántonia earned less than $1700 during the first two years after its publication. In 1920, she met Alfred Knopf, who had recently started a publishing company and was deeply committed to publishing quality books. She switched her publishing affiliation to Knopf, giving him the manuscript of Youth and the Bright Medusa, a collection of short stories. With Knopf as her publisher, not only did she begin to become better known, but she finally achieved financial security: The 1923 royalties from Youth and the Bright Medusa and One of Ours amounted to more than $19,000.
As she became more famous, Cather developed an obsession with privacy, giving few interviews and making few public appearances. There are several possible explanations for this public shyness, all of which no doubt were contributing factors: She believed the artist and the person are separate entities, and she was determined to keep her personal life as private as possible and never to be hurt by criticism as she had been at the university; in addition, interviews and public appearances took time away from her work. It was necessary to give a certain number of lectures, readings, and interviews, join literary clubs, and attend literary lunches. These things had nothing to do with literature, she felt, and she cringed at the thought that she might be committed to opinions that she’d told to some reporter a decade before. Before she died, she stated in her will that she never wanted her works to be made into movies or anthologized or published in cheap reprint editions. She also asked that her letters be destroyed.
Cather received honorary degrees from Columbia, Yale, the University of California, the University of Michigan, and Princeton (she was the first woman ever to receive an honorary degree from Princeton). She won the gold medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and One of Ours won the Pulitzer Prize.
