I missed Louis Armstrong’s birthday this year, and I just realized that I missed Willa Cather’s birthday last year. Cather was born on December 7, 1873.
Here are just two revealing sentences from a Cather letter to E.K. Brown, dated April 9, 1937. The context: Brown’s 1936 article “Willa Cather and the West” (University of Toronto Quarterly, 1936), a copy of which Brown sent to Cather. Cather calls it “an interesting and very friendly pamphlet” and says that Brown has “certainly brought a friendly and unprejudiced mind” to her work. On one point she disagrees:
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.Brown (1905–1951) went on to write the first Cather biography, Willa Cather: A Critical Biography, completed by Leon Edel (1953).
The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).
Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)
[If it needs to be said: “the West” here is the American west, not “the West” so beloved of fascists and white nationalists.]
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