After Willa Cather’s birthday

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.

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).

Brown (1905–1951) went on to write the first Cather biography, Willa Cather: A Critical Biography, completed by Leon Edel (1953).

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.]