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Introduction

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. To that end, we are providing digital editions of Cather texts and scholarship free to the public as well as creating a large amount of unique, born-digital scholarly content. The Archive is a product of a collaboration between the Archives and Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, with additional support from the The University of Nebraska Press, and the Cather Project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The project originated in 1997, and over the years has digitized and published hundreds of thousands of words of Cather-authored texts and Cather scholarship. It now includes, in a fully-searchable format, digital transcriptions of eight Cather books (copyright law forbids digitally republishing her post-1922 works); all of her short fiction pre-1912, many of which are presented in their original periodical publications; her interviews, speeches, and public letters; her uncollected periodical nonfiction from the 1910s; the first ten volumes of Cather Studies; a large, searchable gallery of photographs; multiple biographies; announcements and news from the Cather scholarly community, virtual tours of Cather-related locales, and much more. Some resources unique to the Cather Archive include "Mapping a Writer's World: A Geographic Chronology of the Life of Willa Cather" and The Complete Letters of Willa Cather, a digital scholarly edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The first installment of the Complete Letters was published in January 2018.

The Archive is a foundational endeavor of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, a joint project of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries and the College of Arts & Sciences to focus, provide support, and deepen the quality of the growing array of digital humanities scholarship on the University of Nebraska–Lincoln campus.

If you have any questions or comments about the Cather Archive, please contact Emily Rau at: Emily J. Rau
Editor, Willa Cather Archive
Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities
425 Love Library
University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Lincoln, NE 68588-4100
erau2@unl.edu