The Selected Letters of Willa Cather

Starred review from February 4, 2013
By all rights, this excellent volume of Willa Cather’s letters should not be: in her will, the celebrated American writer specified that none of her correspondence was to be published, ever. Fortunately for general readers and scholars alike, that demand has not been heeded. The letters in this collection have been gathered from the 3,000 that survive in nearly 75 archives across the country. This prodigious editorial feat gives readers a glimpse for the first time into the life and mind of the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of O Pioneers! Beginning with a witty missive written in 1888 when she was only 14, the volume continues through her early years as a successful magazine editor for McLure’s, into the 1910s and ’20s, when she experienced success as a novelist, all the way through to her death in 1947. In addition to exchanges with her family and close friends, the volume contains correspondence with significant literary and artistic figures of the time, including Alfred Knopf, Robert Frost, Yehudi Menuhin, and Thornton Wilder. The editors, meanwhile, have copiously annotated the volume, adding biographical details to flesh out ellipses, as well as providing a useful directory of Cather’s correspondents. Throughout, Cather emerges as a humorous, profound, and difficult personality whose cosmopolitan life and commitment to crafting a successful public persona should challenge misconceptions. 22 photos.

Starred review from February 15, 2013
A revealing, even revelatory collection of correspondence from Willa Cather (1873-1947), a woman who never wanted her letters made public. Editors Jewell (Digital Projects/Univ. of Nebraska; co-editor: The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, 2010) and Stout (Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World, 2000) offer a brief introduction explaining how these letters came into print--and note the virtual absence of letters to two of Cather's most intimate women friends, Isabelle McClung and Edith Lewis. (The latter lived with Cather for many years.) Then the editors retreat, re-emerging only to introduce each division of the text and offer some light but welcome annotations. The letters begin when Cather is a teenager in Red Cloud, Neb., and end just weeks before her death. And what a story they tell. We follow her to college in Lincoln, Neb., where she also began her journalism career; to Pittsburgh, Pa., where she continued as a journalist and a high school English teacher; to New York City, where she worked for McClure's and began publishing the stories and novels that would eventually earn her celebrity, creature comforts, many honorary degrees, a 1923 Pulitzer Prize and exchanges of letters with the likes of Robert Frost, Thornton Wilder, Sinclair Lewis and Langston Hughes, who wrote about his appreciation for the portrayal of African-Americans in her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). There are also many letters to family members--especially to her beloved brother Roscoe--and to friends from childhood and early adulthood, including lifelong friend Carrie Miner Sherwood. The letters reveal Cather as a consummate professional, demonstrating her assiduous work habits and her continual reminders to her editors and publishers about how she wanted her books to look and be marketed. Other notable recipients of her letters included John dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, Alfred A. Knopf, H.L. Mencken and Rebecca West, and the editors offer a helpful biographical dictionary for each recipient. A splendidly edited, generous gift to lovers of Cather and American literature.

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April 1, 2013

Willa Cather's will forbade the publication of her letters. Editors Jewell (digital projects, Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln Lib.; editor, Willa Cather Archive) and Stout (Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World) argue for making the letters accessible to readers because "she was a great writer, and these words of hers deserve to be read." Cather's writings to family and friends, business associates, and readers are compelling; she describes her creative process, delights in praise received, and thanks Thornton Wilder for writing Our Town. She comments on the books she reads, the plays she attends, and her splendid French cook, Josephine. She describes beautiful landscapes and meeting new people, agonizes over the deaths of her brothers, and mourns the brutality of the two world wars. More than 500 letters, presented in their entirety, are arranged chronologically beginning in 1888 (when Cather was 14 years old) and ending with a letter written one week before her death in 1947. Notes accompany each entry, and a biographical directory provides the names of those with whom Cather corresponded. VERDICT Cather scholars and informed readers will appreciate this excellent volume.--Kathryn Bartelt, Univ. of Evansville Libs., IN

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2013
Right off the batthe second sentence of the introduction, as a matter of factwe learn that, in a sense, this book is illegal. Willa Cather, the great, still fondly read American novelist of the Great Plains, stipulated in her will that her letters never be published. With no disrespect to the beloved author of such classics as My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop, she was wrong to issue such a prohibition, and the editors of this selection of her letters are right in tenderly setting aside the restriction, because it is time to let the letters speak for themselves. And what they say is that no truer artist ever existed, in terms of dedication to refining her craft and keeping distractions at bay. But that is not to say Cather did not have a rich, full life brimming with travel and important relationships. To be familiar with her novels is to admire how direct and undecorated was her prose style, and now to be familiar with her in less formal moments, the admiration readers have for her direct approach to writing will only be strengthened. For comprehensive American literature collections.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)