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The Complete Letters of Willa Cather

The Complete Letters of Willa Cather is an endeavor to create a digital, scholarly edition of Cather's entire body of correspondence. The project is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as by the Cather Project and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and with the cooperation of Willa Cather Foundation in Red Cloud, Nebraska.

There are currently 2800 letters in the edition. The Complete Letters is an ongoing project, updated periodically until its completion. In the meantime, you are welcome to browse our database of all known Cather letters

As the Complete Letters of Willa Cather nears completion, Cather Studies will devote a volume to essays that engage with Cather's letters in new and deeper ways. Please see the call for papers for Willa Cather's Letters/Willa Cather and Letters.

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"It’s funny, but the less you “make-up” in a book the harder it is to write. It takes so much more experience and skill and maturity to interpret life as it is than it does to spin yarns. And the longer I live the more I want to write “nothing but the truth”. One grows to have a kind of scorn for the other thing. This is so purely a literary treatment in “Antonia”, and yet so many un-literary people seem not to like but to love it."
Willa Cather to Elsie Cather, November 11 [1918]
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