On Willa Cather’s birthday
After all, isn’t the one real and only autograph in the book itself, on every page of it?
On Willa Cather’s birthday
Now will you be my Santa Claus? I want them to have a good Christmas dinner. I know they won’t buy prunes or dried apricots, they felt too poor to get them last year.
Goodbye, Fine Arts elevators
Sad news: so-called modern elevators will soon replace the manually operated elevators in Chicago’s Fine Arts Building.
Cather in the Capitol
I think of Susan Howe’s repudiation of another writer’s characterization of Emily Dickinson: “Who is this Spider-Artist? Not my Emily Dickinson.” Who is this Nebraska nostalgist? Not my Willa Cather.
Cather cameo
A copy of My Ántonia in Dorothy Malone’s hands.
On Willa Cather’s birthday
Cather comments on an attempted dramatization of A Lost Lady.
After Willa Cather’s birthday
“I think you make a very usual mistake, however, in defining a writer geographically. Myself, I read a man (or a woman) for the climate of his mind, not for the climates in which he has happened to live.”
Writing and dressmaking
Proust and Cather synchronicity.
Happy birthday, Willa Cather
“Now I don’t often write, even to my dearest friends, about my own work, but you just tuck this away where you can read it”: from a 1934 letter.
Out and about
In my waking life, I have all of Willa Cather’s fiction.
Happy birthday, Willa Cather
In a letter to her brother Roscoe Cather, January 8, 1940, Cather writes about Alfred A. Knopf, who became her publisher in 1920.
Cather vs. Trump
Writing in The New York Times, Bret Stephens suggests Willa Cather’s My Ántonia as “the perfect antidote” to Donald Trump. Well, sorta.
“A place remote and islanded”
From Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs.
From the Saturday Stumper
57-Down, three letters: “Religion and art, per Cather.”
“This Cather stuff”
Alex Ross visits Willa Cather’s Nebraska.
“A French garden in Hamilton”
I’ve been trying to decide upon a passage that might interest a reader in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and this paragraph is the best I can do.
Willa Cather’s “picture writing”
A Willa Cather image and Ezra Pound’s poetics of the ideogram.
Houses, homes, legs, limbs
From Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918).
“Spare the finger-bowls!”
From Willa Cather’s My Ántonia.
“This is the truth”
From Willa Cather’s My Ántonia.
Nebraska all day long
From Willa Cather’s My Ántonia.
“The beds would not get made”
Willa Cather to a lifelong friend.
Willa Cather, corrected again
A telegram with a last-minute correction.
Willa Cather, corrected
“Salesmen in New York and Chicago always correct me when I pronounce my own name.”
From “The Diamond Mine”
From a Willa Cather story.
Truman Capote meets Willa Cather
From an unfinished account that Truman Capote began writing the day before his death.
“Oh yes, of course, art simplifies”
Willa Cather, from a letter to Ida Kleber Todd.
“In the dark like ourselves”
From Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock.
“Layers and layers of shelter”
From Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock.
From One of Ours
The meaning of “literature.”