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The Willa Cather Archive

The Willa Cather Archive is an ambitious endeavor to create a rich, useful, and widely accessible site for the study of Willa Cather's life and writings.

The Complete Letters of Willa Cather

We have surpassed 2,000 letters in our major ongoing project, The Complete Letters of Willa Cather. Thanks to funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and support from the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, we began publication of these letters in January 2018. Follow along with the project on Twitter, @HastilyCather.

Photograph of Cather letters

New on the Willa Cather Archive.

Cover of First Edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop

April 2023. First editions of Death Comes for the Archbishop and My Mortal Enemy are now available on the Willa Cather Archive. We have provided page images and the full text of each of these novels. We will continue to publish Cather's novels and other works as they enter the public domain in coming years.


January 2021. With the beginning of the new year, Willa Cather's 1925 novel The Professor's House is now in the public domain and available on the Willa Cather Archive. Page images are now available alongside the full text of the novel.

Cover of First Edition of The Professor's House

Cover of Cather Studies Volume 12

January 2020. The full text of Cather Studies Volume 12 is now available on the Willa Cather Archive. Published by the Cather Project in the Department of English and the University of Nebraska Press, Willa Cather and the Arts was edited by Guy J. Reynolds. Enjoy this great collection of essays.


December 2019. The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of A Lost Lady is now available on the Willa Cather Archive! Published by the University of Nebraska Press and the Cather Project in UNL's English Department, this Scholarly Edition features a historical essay by Susan J. Rosowski with Kari A. Ronning, explanatory notes by Kari A. Ronning, and textual editing by Charles W. Mignon and Frederick M. Link with Kari A. Ronning.

Cover of Cather Studies Volume 11

November 2019. Our list of Nonfiction published by Willa Cather now includes Cather's essay "Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle," published in the Nation on September 5, 1923.


Cover of First Edition of A Lost Lady

October 2019. Willa Cather's 1923 novel A Lost Lady is now available on the Willa Cather Archive for the first time! Enjoy the full text, complete with page scans of our own first edition. Keep your eye out for more of Cather's novels as they enter the public domain in the years to come.


December 2018. The full text of Cather Studies Volume 11 is now available on the Archive! Published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2017, Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux was edited by Ann Moseley, John J. Murphy, and Robert Thacker. This volume is dedicated "To the Memory of David Porter (1935–2016): Cather scholar, musician, teacher, and wise friend."

Cover of Cather Studies Volume 11

Photograph of Martin Anderson Nexo

October 2018. Willa Cather's critical essay "A New World Novelist in Europe: The Rapidly Widening Fame of Martin Nexö in Modern Literature" is now available on the Willa Cather Archive. Melissa Homestead recently uncovered this previously unrecorded essay published in the July 1920 issue of Vanity Fair. Read more about this in Homestead's article "Willa Cather on a 'New World Novelist': A Newly Discovered 1920 Vanity Fair," which appeared in the Winter 2018 American Literary Realism, Volume 50, Number 2.


February 2017. The full text of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of The Song of the Lark is now available on the Willa Cather Archive. This edition includes extensive explanatory notes, a historical essay, and a textual essay outlining the publication history of the novel, as well as other resources. Enjoy!

Illustration from 'The Song of the Lark'