Basic Information for the Willa Cather House
Address: 1180 Murray Hill Avenue
Access: This is a private residence, so please be respectful. Tours are not available. Instead, a tour of Pittsburgh based around his work is available.
Paul's Case Walking Tour:
Map and Guide: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1IUydID1Qjt1f1Vo_SWzjowTWG3Fc4EmE
Available: Sunrise to Sunset; Carnegie Museum of Art and Carnegie Music Hall have separate hours and admission prices
Length: the tour takes approximately 3 hours to complete at an average pace, taking time to read.
About the Willa Cather House
About Willa Cather
Willa Cather is an American writer and editor who gained national recognition for her novels and short stories. She was drawn to Pittsburgh in 1896 to work for Home Monthly magazine, and over the course of a decade, became a teacher and moved on from her previous magazine job to write and edit for the Pittsburgh Leader, which was an esteemed newspaper at the time. While she initially stayed in boarding houses, everything changed when she met Isabelle McClung in 1899. The two became very close, and later McClung would invite her to stay at her family’s mansion in Squirrel Hill until 1906, when she was hired for a new magazine job in New York. While not technically hers, this house would come to be known as the Willa Cather residence. Before moving, Cather published a set of short stories that included “Paul’s Case,” which was set in Pittsburgh. The plot follows a troubled teenager Paul, who runs away from home and visits Pittsburgh landmarks such as the Carnegie Hall of Music and the Schenley Hotel. His travels have since been adapted into a virtual tour using maps software.
Paul’s Case Walking Tour
The Paul’s Case Walking Tour, created for this guidebook, follows the story through through the locations referenced in the text. The tour has 13 pins on the map, each referencing the text, providing relevant music, or providing information about the location. The tour is best experienced by attempting to follow in the order of the story, however, that would require doubling back at some points, so an approximation is understandable. The story is available at this link – or, the book containing the story can be checked out from the local library, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Read along as you walk between locations, listen to the music, and immerse yourself in the story and the life of Paul. It’s a unique way to read, and an experience that’s sure to stick with you.
If a literary walking tour doesn’t sound like enough of a reason to take the trek, consider the many other places to visit in the neighborhood; this tour is completely on your own schedule, and there are plenty of stops you can take along the way to make a full day out of the experience.
Willa Cather’s Workingwoman Characters and the Westinghouse Strike of 1914
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, women in America were making substantial progress towards equality by advocating for the right to vote, higher education, and better working positions. These early instances where they sought to move away from the typical caretaker roles inspired the creation of many literary female characters at the time. Willa Cather, though not a vocal supporter of feminism, included strong women in the short stories that she published over the course of her professional career.
Links Across Time and Reality: Experiencing the Paul’s Case Walking Tour
It’s a sign of a good book when you can get so immersed in the story that you forget where you are and have to look around for a few seconds to remember after you finish reading. On the Paul’s Case Walking Tour, that experience is completely flipped, and I learned that it is possible to be fully immersed in a text while still being fully immersed in the real world.