It was the first trip to Europe for Cather, a high-school teacher of English and Latin in Pittsburgh on summer leave. With her friend Isabelle McClung, she visited with genuine wonder such sights as London’s East End and Paris’s Notre Dame. The excerpt that follows hints at works to come, Shadows on the Rock and Death Comes for the Archbishop, which both draw on the French landscape for inspiration (“there is nothing but a little cardboard house of stucco, and a plateau of brown pine needles, and green fir trees, the scent of dried lavender always in the air, and the sea reaching like a wide blue road into the sky”). Cather won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for One of Ours in 1922. She was born in Virginia and died in New York City. from WILLA CATHER IN EUROPE Le Lavandou, September 10, 1902 We came to Lavandou chiefly because we could not find anyone who had ever been here, and because in Paris people seemed never to have heard of the place. It does not exist on the ordinary map of France, and Baedeker, in his Southern France, merely mentions it.
