My Mortal Enemy

Alfred A. Knopf, 1926

" 'We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.' "

Cover of first edition of My Mortal Enemy

Editions

Serialization

First serialized in McCall's from May to October, 1926.

First Edition

Published by Alfred A. Knopf on October 20, 1926.

First English Edition

Published by William Heinemann in April 1928.

Autograph Edition

Published by Houghton Mifflin Co. in 1938 in a volume with Lucy Gayheart.

Related material available on the Willa Cather Archive

Scholarship

"The Thrill of His Own Poor Little Nerve": Art and the Ambivalence of Voice in My Mortal Enemy

By Mathieu Duplay, Cather Studies Volume 8

Unmasking Willa Cather's "Mortal Enemy"

By Charles Johanningsmeier, Cather Studies Volume 5

The Comic Form of Willa Cather's Art: An Ecocritical Reading

By Susan J. Rosowski, Cather Studies Volume 5

Willa Cather's Condition: Disease, Doctors, and Diagnoses as Social Action

By Nadeane Trowse, Cather Studies Volume 4

Her Mortal Enemy's Daughter: Cather and the Writing of Age

By Ann Romines, Cather Studies Volume 3

Gilt Diana and Ivory Christ: Love and Christian Charity in My Mortal Enemy

By John J. Murphy, Cather Studies Volume 3

Strains of Blood: Myra Driscoll and the Romance of the Celts

By Robert K. Miller, Cather Studies Volume 2

Cather's New World Divine Comedy: The Dante Connection

By John J. Murphy, Cather Studies Volume 1

Dispossession and Redemption in the Novels of Willa Cather

By Ann W. Fisher-Wirth, Cather Studies Volume 1