From the time she was a young child, Willa Cather had a gift with words and she loved stories. As a child on the Nebraska prairie, she heard many stories from her neighbors, many of them immigrants, and she never forgot them. She begun to write stories of her own, and even after she became a successful journalist, she made time for them. Her great novels of the prairie, such as O Pioneers! and My Antonia, established her as one of the finest writers of all time. In Writer of the Plains, author Tom Streissguth paints a clear and interesting portrait of this complex and independent woman.