A Guide to the Papers of Willa Cather, 1899-1949 Cather, Willa, Papers 6494, etc.

A Guide to the Papers of Willa Cather, 1899-1949

A Collection in
The Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature
Special Collections
The University of Virginia Library
Accession Number 6494, etc.


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Processed by: Special Collections Staff

Repository
Special Collections, University of Virginia Library
Accession number
6494, etc.
Title
Papers of Willa Cather 1899-1949
Physical Characteristics
This collection consists of ca. 290 items.
Language
English

Administrative Information

Access Restrictions

There are no restrictions.

Use Restrictions

No copies in any format of photostats from originals in the Pierpont Morgan Library

Preferred Citation

Papers of Willa Cather, 1899-1949, Accession #6494, etc., Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

Acquisition Information

6494: Deposit, 1960 April 30; Gift July 1, 1991 6494-a: Purchase, 1963 January 16 6494-b: Deposit, 1963 December 17 (Accessioned 1964 May 11); Gift July 1, 1991 6494-c: Purchase, 1965 September 27 (Accessioned 1965 November 15) 6494-d: Purchase, 1966 February 15. 6494-e: Purchase, 1967 December 13 (Accessioned 1968 September 4) 6494-f: Purchase, 1968 May 23 (Accessioned September 26) 6494-g: Archival transfer, 1973 September 25. 6494-h: Archival transfer, n.d. 6494-i: Purchase, 1977 October 5. 6494-j: Purchase, 1981 February 11. 6494-k: Archival transfer, 1982 April 19. 6494-l: Gift, 1983 July 14. 6494-m: Gift, 1983 December 20. 6494-n: Gift, 1984 April 16. 6494-o: Purchase, 1989 April 19. 6494-p: Transfer, 1989 June 22. 6494-q: Purchase, 1989 July 19. 6494-r: Purchase, 1989 November 11. 6494-s: Purchase, 1993 January 4. 6494-t: Purchase, 1994 December 23. 6494-u: Purchase, 1995 December 12. 6494-v: Purchase, 1997 April 14. 6494-w: Transfer, 1998 September 1. 6494-x: Purchase, 2001 August 29. 6494-y: Purchase, 2002 July 11. 6494-z: Purchase, 2003/2004. 6494-aa: Purchase, 2004 February 4. 6494-ab: Given by Murray Nimmo in honor of Gregg Ross Hopkins, 2009 June 26.

Biographical/Historical Information

Willa Cather, 1873-1947: Family: Given name originally Wilella; born December 7, 1873, in Back Creek Valley, VA; died of a cerebral hemorrhage, April 24, 1947, in New York, NY; daughter of Charles F. (a rancher and insurance salesman) and Mary Virginia (Boak) Cather. Education: University of Nebraska, A.B., 1895. Career: Newspaper correspondent in Nebraska, c. 1890-1895; Daily Leader, Pittsburgh, PA, telegraph editor and drama critic, 1897-1901; traveled in Europe, 1902; Allegheny High School, Pittsburgh, teacher of English and Latin and head of English department, 1902- 1905; McClure's, New York, NY, managing editor, 1906-1911; full- time writer, 1911-1947.

Willa Sibert Cather is among the most distinguished American women in early twentieth-century fiction. She wrote most of her major works between 1913 and the late 1920s, during an age that encompassed World War I and spanned massive social change and modernization. As related by Louis Auchincloss in Pioneers and Caretakers, Cather felt that the world had split in two after 1922 and that she "belonged to the earlier half." Her writings reflect a desire to withdraw from the modern world into the refuge of a stable past.

Critics have compared Cather's balanced, carefully crafted, and evocative prose style to that of other writers, including mentor Sarah Orne Jewett, American novelist Henry James, and French naturalist Gustave Flaubert. Cather strove to preserve the past through her works, depicting the harsh life of pioneering immigrant farmers who settled the prairies of the western United States in such novels as O Pioneers! and My Antonia. Several other novels and the bulk of her short fiction explore another recurring theme-- the complexities of the artistic temperament: Cather often portrayed artists in conflict, wrestling between the sophisticated allure of the East and the freedom and earthy simplicity of the West.

Cather's writings are based largely on her early childhood experiences. Born in the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia, she moved with her family to Red Cloud, Nebraska, a market town among the state's vast prairie lands, when she was nine years old. Cather grew up among European-born ranchers and farmers. She recognized the harshness of the immigrants' life-style and witnessed the development of their children into an imaginative new generation of Americans with dreams of a life rich in the arts: she would eventually incorporate into her fiction both the stoicism and the ambitions of the body of people with whom she matured.

After graduating from the University of Nebraska in 1895, Cather moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she worked as a journalist, editor, and teacher. In 1906 she accepted a position as editor of McClure's magazine in New York City. Having spent more than a decade nurturing her literary aspirations in her spare time, Cather realized by 1911 that she needed to devote more of her time and energy to writing in order to reach her creative potential. That year, at the urging of her friend Jewett, she resigned her post at McClure's, forsaking journalism for a career as a full-time writer.

While Cather is known primarily for her novels, her first published work was a volume of poetry titled April Twilights. The 1903 collection prefigures the themes of human struggle, unrealized potential, the search for self, and a retreat to the past that would color the author's later fiction, but many critics have agreed that Cather's sentiments are not best expressed in verse.

Cather's second publication, a collection of short fiction titled The Troll Garden, appeared in 1905. The volume's stories are written in tightly woven, lyrical prose, foreshadowing the graceful and economic style that would become the author's trademark. Each story in The Troll Garden features an artist or a character of artistic temperament, and several of the selections are set against the backdrop of a raw prairie.

Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge, was not a critical success. Originally composed while Cather was still an editor at McClure's but not published until 1912, the slim book tells of bridge builder Bartley Alexander, a married man in love with a London actress. After deciding to leave his wife for his other love, Alexander is called to inspect a bridge being constructed over the St. Lawrence River. Like Alexander's character, the bridge is flawed; it falls during the inspection, carrying the man to his death. Though critics conceded that it was well constructed, Alexander's Bridge was faulted for its overly contrived plot.

Cather expressed little satisfaction with Alexander's Bridge and reportedly regarded her next work of fiction, O Pioneers! , as her first fully realized novel. The product of two of Cather's earlier short works, O Pioneers! focuses on Alexandra Bergson, the strong and determined daughter of a Swedish immigrant. Left to carry on her father's struggle against the harsh prairie lands of the West, the industrious Alexandra fights to keep her family together and sacrifices her youth and beauty to a lifetime of hard labor. While the story ends with Alexandra's eventual success and happiness in her later years with a man worthy of her love, a majority of critics have suggested that the novel gains most of its emotional thrust from a narrative digression involving duplicitous lovers.

Cather's next novel, The Song of the Lark, established several stylistic and thematic trends that would dominate her later works. The story turns on Thea Kronborg's rise to fame in the operatic world. The daughter of a Swedish preacher, young and vibrant Thea lives with her family in the small and uninspired town of Moonstone, Colorado. Her affinity for music and fascination with the world of art lead her to study music in Chicago. Following rigorous training in the city, the aspiring soprano retreats to the Southwest for a summer to reflect on the course of her life. Surrounded by the timeless, serene desert--a rich repository of native American artifacts--Thea contemplates the meaning of art. While bathing in a stream below an ancient cliff dwelling, she finds a piece of broken Indian pottery and, in studying it, derives a view of art in general: "The stream and the broken pottery: what was art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself?" The novel ends with Thea's triumph as an opera star.

My Antonia, Cather's 1918 novel, is widely regarded among the author's finest works. Reminiscent of the earlier prairie novel O Pioneers!, My Antonia tells the story of Bohemian immigrant farm girl Antonia Shimerda, a heroic character who has become a literary archetype for the Earth Mother. Narrator Jim Burden, neighbor to the Shimerdas, grows up with Antonia and chronicles her family's struggles to establish themselves on the Nebraska plains. The two characters share a love of the heart which is never expressed physically. Jim goes away to college and studies the classics; Antonia becomes involved with a railroad worker who impregnates and abandons her. The heroine has her baby and eventually finds happiness with a Czechoslovakian farmer named Cuzak. Years later, Jim--now a lawyer in the East--returns to Nebraska to find Antonia physically aged and weary, but exultant in her happy marriage and her many children. In an article for Literary Review, T. K. Whipple declared that Antonia's ultimate contentment proves Cather's "world is tragic ... but not futile."

In My Antonia, Cather once again expresses an almost obsessive longing for the past, this time through the character of Antonia's father. Homesick for his native land, Mr. Shimerda despairs and shoots himself.

For the four years between 1918 and 1922, Cather published only two works, a volume of short stories titled Youth and the Bright Medusa and a novel, One of Ours. The Youth and the Bright Medusa collection, published in 1920, borrowed largely from stories previously printed in The Troll Garden, but also contained several newly anthologized selections, including the critically acclaimed "Coming, Aphrodite! " Four years after the release of My Antonia, Cather finally completed her fifth novel, in 1922. The central character, Claude Wheeler, is a virtuous youth who lives in an increasingly materialistic and prosperous Nebraska. Disillusioned by the deteriorating values of his family, he enlists in the armed forces and dies in battle during World War I. Reviewers felt that Cather's treatment of the Nebraska scenes approached the quality of her best work, but they also alleged that Cather oversimplified the war. Despite such criticism, One of Ours earned the Pulitzer Prize in 1922.

Cather's next novel, A Lost Lady, garnered greater praise. Published in 1923, A Lost Lady chronicles the death of an era. Following an accident that leaves her once-powerful husband, Captain Forrester, an invalid, Marian Forrester begins a gradual process of moral degeneration. She longs for a life of culture, wealth, and sophistication, an existence that seems unattainable in the face of her husband's condition. Instead of turning her back on the petty bourgeois world of the present, Marian succumbs to its demands, taking refuge in the false comforts of alcohol and sexual abandon.

Perhaps the most powerful expression of Cather's disillusionment with the modern world is her 1925 novel The Professor's House. Having earned a prestigious literary prize for his multi-volume history of the Spanish in North America, Professor Godfrey St. Peter finds himself weary and uninspired. The completion of the enormous composition leaves him without a focal point for his creative energies. St. Peter's wife sets out to furnish an ostentatious new house with the professor's prize money. Reflecting on the materialistic nature of his family and society at large, St. Peter begins to reminisce about a former student, Tom Outland, who had died in the war. At this point in the story, the narrative breaks to accommodate an account of young Tom's pursuits prior to enrolling at the professor's college, including his discovery of prehistoric cliff dwellings in Colorado and his unsuccessful efforts to secure their preservation. The story then returns to St. Peter, who emerges from a near death experience with a new resolve to go on living.

Cather followed The Professor's House with her most inflammatory fiction, My Mortal Enemy , about a selfish, embittered, old woman who--looking back on a life lacking monetary prosperity--mourns the day she married for love. The author's next novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, emphasizes the very contentment and tranquility that was missing in My Mortal Enemy. Set in mid- nineteenth-century New Mexico, the episodic story is a fictionalization of the life and achievements of Archbishop Lamy, the territory's first appointed bishop. The novel spans more than four decades in the lives of the archbishop and his vicar. Death Comes for the Archbishop earned substantial acclaim for its evocations of the Southwest, and it remains one of Cather's most widely read works.

Shadows on the Rock, published in 1932, marks a further retreat into the past, this time to late-seventeenth-century Quebec. Focusing on one year in the lives of a widowed apothecary and his twelve-year-old daughter, the novel is regarded less for its dramatic action than for its lush descriptive passages and depiction of life along the St. Lawrence River. The book was written at a particularly difficult period in the author's life, following her father's death and the grave illness of her mother. Critics have suggested that Cather--craving stability during trying times--set Shadows on the Rock in Quebec because of the city's consistent resistance to change.

Cather's 1932 short story collection Obscure Destinies enunciates familiar themes of tradition and retrospection through three stories set in the Midwest. The most famous of these, a selection titled "Old Mrs. Harris, " concerns three generations of women in Nebraska. Cather based the characters on her experiences in Red Cloud living with her mother and grandmother. Absorbed in their own lives, the two younger women fail to appreciate Mrs. Harris until after her death. Cather's portrait of isolation and aging was widely praised and, together with "Paul's Case, " ranks with her best short fiction.

In 1935 Cather published another novel, Lucy Gayheart, which turns on the relationship between young pianist Lucy Gayheart and married baritone Clement Sebastian. Lucy and Clement fall in love, but, following a European summer concert tour, Clement accidentally drowns. After months of remorse and mourning, Lucy vows to resume her career in music; then, while skating on an ice- covered river, she falls through and drowns as well. Although Lucy Gayheart sold well, many critics faulted its predictability and oversentimentality.

Cather's final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, was published in 1940. Based on an actual event, the story recounts a young girl's arduous life as a slave during the Civil War. Touching on issues of miscegenation, sexual exploitation, jealousy, and racism, the novel earned praise as a provocative, accomplished work.

In an essay from the 1936 collection Not Under Forty titled "The Novel Demeuble, " Cather called her approach to the novel "unfurnished": "Out of the teeming, gleaming, stream of the present," she wrote, a novel "must select the eternal material of art." Commenting on the author's lifelong literary achievements, Daiches concluded: "She belongs to no school.... The heroic nostalgia that pursued her until the end first changed her from a minor imitator of James to a novelist of fierce originality and individuality, and from the moment she discovered herself with O Pioneers! she went her own way with remarkably little notice of her contemporaries. She developed a style both strong and supple, combining forthrightness with sensitivity: she was one of the least showy novelists of her time." Cather died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage on April 24, 1947, in her New York City apartment.

Scope and Content

The collection contains the manuscripts of "A likeness, " and "Prarie spring, " two poems from April twilight; galleys of Books II and III of Lucy Gayheart; page proofs of part 4, Book I ( "A bell and a miracle ") and parts 1 & 2, Book II ( "The white mules, ""The lonely road to Mora ") of Death comes for the Archbishop.

In letters Cather discusses her travels, family and friends, her work as editor for McClure's magazine her health, her current activities, her reading, and her writing. There are also letters to admirers, students, and reviewers, and notes of thanks and sympathy.

Major topics in the correspondence include impressions of New Mexico; her friendship with Olive Fremstad; her work, especially on McClure's autobiography, an article on Ethelbert Nevin, the novels O Pioneers! Song of the lark, My Antonia, One of ours, Death comes for the Archbishop, and Sapphira and the slave girl; her inspirations for various characters and backgrounds; critical response to her work; her critiques of the work of Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant; and incorrect impressions of her by Ford Maddox Ford. A listing of the letters contains many notes by Elizabeth S. Sergeant on the contents.

The papers also contain clippings, photographs and articles including one by Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Bent.

Among the correspondents are William Valentine Alexander, Henry Walcott Boynton, William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite, Cyril Clemens, Perceval Gibbon, William Lucius Graves, Will Owen Jones, Orson Lowell, Carrie Miner Louise Pound, Violo Roseboro', Zo Akins Rumbold, Louise Stegner, Harvey Taylor, Henry Chester Tracy, and Josephine and Pauline Goldmark.

Arrangement

The collection is arranged in six series. Series I, Literary Manuscripts is arranged alphabetically by title or first line. Series II: Galley Proofs and Page Proofs, is arranged alphabetically by title. Series III, Correspondence is arranged alphabetically by surname of the author. Series IV: Miscellaneous Documents, Printed Matter, is arranged chronologically. Series V: Photographs, Etchings, Busts. Series VI: Uncollected Published Works, in sub-arranged as fiction and non-fiction, both of which are arranged chronologically.

Contents List

Series I: Literary Manuscripts
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Series II: Galley Proofs and Page Proofs
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Series III: Correspondence
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Series IV: Miscellaneous Documents, Printed Matter
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Series V: Photographs, Etchings, Busts
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Series VI: Uncollected Published Works

Photocopies of Willa Cather's "uncollected" published works, assembled in two volumes by James B. Meriwether, Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, "to assist me in teaching a graduate seminar."

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