The Selected Letters of Willa Cather will be released on April 16th.   Although if it would have been up to Cather, her letters would never be read by the public.

She forbade the publication of the letters in her will.  However the editors of the book state that while they’re not following the letter of Cather’s will, they are following its intent.  They state that Cather wanted people to focus more on her work than her personal life.  More than sixty five years after her passing, Cather’s literary legacy is secure.

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.

Order the The Selected Letters of Willa Cather