Willa Cather: A Critical Biography.
[Cather, Willa]. Willa Cather: A Critical Biography. By E. K. Brown, completed by Leon Edel. New York: Knopf, 1953.
8vo.; bright green cloth, with two faint damp stains on rear cover; dust-jacket with photograph of Cather, lightly frayed, especially to top edge, with one chip to rear panel.
First edition of the first biographical study of Cather. A gift copy inscribed by both Ethel Jones Litchfield and Edith Lewis, both of whom were close friends of Cather. As Cather’s literary executrix and trustee, Lewis contributed greatly to the writing of this authorized biography: To Alice with love [ ] Ethel Litchfield May 11th 1953. And: For Alice Tiebout/ This distinguished work of E.K. Brown and Leon Edel/ Edith Lewis. Cather began a correspondence with Brown, then a Professor of English at the University of Chicago, after he published an appreciation of her work in honor of her seventieth birthday in 1946. After her death a year later, Cather’s companion and trustee, Edith Lewis, came to Brown with the plan for a biography that would apply knowledge of Cather’s life to a critique of her work. Just as Cather’s final letter to Brown remained unfinished at her death, Brown’s introduction ends mid-sentence due to his own early death in 1951. The book was finished by Brown’s longtime friend Leon Edel; the two met as undergraduates at McGill University in Montreal in the mid-20s. In his summarizing acknowledgments, Edel identifies Lewis as a collaborator in the biography, as she conceived of it, researched the material, and wrote the many long reminiscences incorporated into the text. This was Edel’s last significant endeavor before he embarked on his compendious study of Henry James which would consume his energies for the rest of his career.
Lewis and Cather shared an apartment starting in 1908; for the next forty years the two of them were constant companions “separated only when one or the other of them was traveling or called home by illness in the family;” they even often traveled together. Litchfield was another member of Cather’s small circle of intimates—completed by Alfred and Blanche Knopf and the Menuhin family, especially the children Yehudi and Hephzibah. Cather met Litchfield, a musician, in 1902. When Litchfield’s husband died, she moved to New York from Pittsburgh, after which Cather saw her almost every week for the rest of her life.
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