It’s the birthday of Susan’s Almanac Project (b. 2017), best known for snarky comments about that greatest of horrors ever visited on mankind, the British boarding school. The Almanac Project was born in Penfield, New York, out of sheer necessity when the far more comprehensive and erudite Writer’s Almanac went belly up. The perpetrator of the Almanac is juuuuuuuust lazy enough (and, well, it’s Friday) to wonder if she could get away with recycling last year’s very first post, featuring Noam Chomsky, but has decided that wouldn’t be cricket. Therefore…

It’s the birthday of the great American novelist Willa Cather (1873-1947), who would eventually claim to have been born in 1876 instead of 1873, which, from today’s vantage point, makes her seem so much younger, doesn’t it? Cather is best known for the novels O Pioneers! (1913), My Antonia (1918), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).

Cather was born Wilella Sibert Cather in Back Creek Valley, Virginia, but moved with her family to a homestead near Red Cloud, Nebraska, then the frontier. The family moved to Red Cloud itself in 1884 and remained there for 20 years. In town, Cather met an Englishman who taught her Greek and Latin because nothing prepares you for life on the frontier like a good working knowledge of ancient Greek. Cather graduated from high school there, the only one of the three graduates not predicted by the local paper to go on to accomplish great things. (Snicker.) While a freshman at the University of Nebraska, Cather’s first publication, “Essay on Carlyle,” appeared in the Nebraska State Journal—and she thereafter determined to be a writer.

After graduation, Cather took various editing positions back east, including one at the muckraking lit journal McClure’s in New York (1906). By then, she’d published her first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden (1905). After bolstering McClure’s circulation, she ditched editing for writing novels full time and published her first, Alexander’s Bridge, in 1912, which was set in several big cities, and really, who cares about that? Fortunately, Cather had met the great regional Maine writer, Sarah Orne Jewett, in 1908, and under her influence began writing about her native Nebraska, and the rest is history. Cather won the Pulitzer for One of Ours in 1923 and went on to win many other awards and honorary degrees.

Cather lived for 38 years with literary critic Edith Lewis; scholars, who often don’t have enough to do but need to pull in grant money somehow, disagree on whether they were lovers. The two lived in a Park Avenue apartment but often summered at a cottage on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, in the Bay of Fundy. (I just like to say that: Bay of Fundy. Fundy Fundy Fundy.) After Cather died of a cerebral hemorrhage, Lewis lived another 25 years and wrote Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record (2000).

Have some more coffee on this fine white Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.