This first publication of the letters of one of America’s
most consistently admired writers is both an exciting and a
significant literary event. Willa Cather, wanting to be
judged on her work alone, clearly forbade the publication of
her letters in her will. But now, more than sixty-five years
after her death, with her literary reputation as secure as a
reputation can be, the letters have become available for
publication.
The 566 letters collected here, nearly
20 percent of the total, range from the funny (and mostly
misspelled) reports of life in Red Cloud in the 1880s that
Cather wrote as a teenager, through those from her college
years at the University of Nebraska, her time as a
journalist in Pittsburgh and New York, and during her
growing eminence as a novelist. Postcards and letters
describe her many travels around the United States and
abroad, and they record her last years in the 1940s, when
the loss of loved ones and the disasters of World War II
brought her near to despair. Written to family and close
friends and to such luminaries as Sarah Orne Jewett, Robert
Frost, Yehudi Menuhin, Sinclair Lewis, and the president of
Czechoslovakia, Thomas Masaryk, they reveal her in her daily
life as a woman and writer passionately interested in
people, literature, and the arts in general.
The
voice heard in these letters is one we already know from her
fiction: confident, elegant, detailed, openhearted,
concerned with profound ideas, but also at times funny,
sentimental, and sarcastic. Unfiltered as only intimate
communication can be, they are also full of small fibs,
emotional outbursts, inconsistencies, and the joys and
sorrows of the moment. The Selected Letters is a deep
pleasure to read and to ponder, sure to appeal to those with
a special devotion to Cather as well as to those just making
her acquaintance.
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