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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 2698 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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"The distance between excellent writing and good writing, that has a commercial value because it is unique and individual, is the longest distance in the world. I am not speaking now of bad writing that has a commercial value, because there are millions of reasons why bad writing should have a commercial value. But there is only one reason why good writing should have it. A man must have experienced things pretty keenly and must have got pretty close to things before his experiences or the degree of his nearness can matter to many people in this frenzied workshop of a country."
Willa Cather to Norman Foerster, July 20, 1910
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