Introduction

Willa Cather's Letters | Contents of the Initial 2018 Publication

The Complete Letters of Willa Cather is an endeavor to publish, for the first time, the collected correspondence of one of the most significant and widely-read American novelists of the twentieth century. The author of My Àntonia, A Lost Lady, The Professor's House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and many other celebrated books, Willa Cather was a woman with a compelling personal story, remarkable professional accomplishments, and a courageously independent life; her personal writings are of deep interest to many. The letters, long withheld from publication and even from quotation due to restrictions in Cather's will, provide unparalleled insight into the life, creative imagination, and professional and social context of this extraordinary woman. The project is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by 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.

Willa Cather's Letters

Willa Cather's will, executed in 1943, requested that her letters not be published in whole or in part, a request that was honored for over 65 years. In 2009, however, the literary trust created by Cather's will ceased to function, and a new entity was created to manage Cather's literary properties. The Willa Cather Trust, a partnership between the education-centered Willa Cather Foundation and the University of Nebraska Foundation, decided that the time had come to acknowledge Cather's importance to the greater culture and allow her letters to be published. The Trust implemented this change of policy, effective in 2011, in large part because they understood the quality of the correspondence and the meaning it would have for many readers. Like Cather's fiction, which is celebrated for its rich prose style and human perceptivity, the letters, to quote early Cather biographer Leon Edel, “are touched with the cadence, as with the radiance, of her style; they reflect also, as letters can, the directness and generosity and charm of the personality, its courage and steadfastness” (xxiii). Furthermore, and of particular interest to many contemporary literary scholars, the letters reveal Cather's complex network of personal and professional connections, her embedded-ness in her cultural milieu, more directly than any other document. The letters are both striking examples of the direct, well-considered prose Cather is celebrated for and evidence of the psychological and social complexity of Cather's life.

The first publication of the letters appeared in 2013 with The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, co-edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis P. Stout. That volume, featuring only about 18% of the known surviving correspondence, was lightly annotated and arranged chronologically to provide a narrative of Cather's life and development. This digital, complete edition has long been imagined as a follow-up to the print volume, and the response to that volume has underscored the value of that vision.

In 2018, Cather's letters enter into the public domain, allowing for unrestricted publication of these once heavily-restricted documents. Our edition of The Complete Letters of Willa Cather honors the wide range of readers and scholars interested in Cather's work by providing free, open access to the texts of the letters and the treasure of information they contain. As described below, we do this through 1) markup that captures detailed information about the letters, 2) an interface that allows for easy searching through the complete texts and relevant metadata, 3) browsing features, like automated indices of works and names, that help users find material of interest in the corpus, and 4) annotations that make the intellectual content of the letters more accessible to all.

Contents of the Initial 2018 Publication

As the title indicates, The Complete Letters of Willa Cather aims to publish all of Cather's known surviving correspondence, which currently is approaching 3,100 letters. These letters are held in nearly 90 different repositories around the world. Rather than wait until all of the letters are ready for publication in the edition—which we currently believe will be in 2021—we have decided to publish groups of letters as they are completed. Our first group features letters from the largest individual collections of Cather correspondence, letters that have some intellectual coherence through the long relationships they document. Specifically, we are publishing letters Cather wrote to her family, certain old friends, and her publishers. The collections featured in the initial publication are from:

• Archives & Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• Nebraska State Historical Society
• Willa Cather Foundation
• Houghton Library at Harvard University
• The Dobkin Family Collection of Feminism

Broadly speaking, the first three repositories are dominated by letters to Cather family members and life-long friends like Carrie Miner Sherwood, and the last two repositories feature the correspondence between Cather and her publishers Houghton Mifflin and Alfred A. Knopf. To learn about the specific letters currently available in the edition, please consult the browsing tools available from the main page of the edition.

Following the completion of the 1500+ letters from these collections, we will next publish letters from the Dorothy Canfield Fisher correspondence (Bailey-Howe Library, University of Vermont), the Elizabeth Sergeant correspondence (Morgan Library), and the Miner family correspondence (Newberry Library and Willa Cather Foundation), followed by the collections in many other repositories.

Works Cited

1. Edel, Leon. “Editor's Foreword,” in Willa Cather: A Critical Biography by E. K. Brown and completed by Leon Edel (New York: Knopf, 1953), xvii-xxiv.