Willa Cather: A Memoir. Boxed with Willa Cather Living.
Two Early Cather Memoirs
Inscribed To Leon Edel
[Cather, Willa]. Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living. A Personal Record. New York: Knopf, 1953.
8vo.; faint offsetting to endpapers; olive and white paper-covered boards, blue cloth spine.
Boxed together with:
Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley. Willa Cather: A Memoir. Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott, (1953).
8vo.; frontispiece photo of Cather; faint foxing to rear endpapers; black cloth, very light wear to head and heel.
First editions of these memoirs by two of Cather’s closest female friends of her later years, each presented to Leon Edel. Edith Lewis, Cather’s literary executrix and companion, inscribed her book: For Leon Edel who would be a good comrade on any difficult undertaking—with admiration and gratitude from his friend Edith Lewis. July 1953. Sergeant met Cather while working on a piece for McClure’s, and the two formed a fast and lasting friendship. She inscribed her memoir of Cather to Edel: To Leon Edel, with sincere regards and appreciation of critical readings and biographical interchanges! Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. The MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, N.H., August, 1953.
Edel’s great career as a biographer—his five volume life of Henry James won virtually every literary prize awarded—began in 1954 when he completed E.K. Brown‘s life of Willa Cather, the first book length biography. Edel and Brown met as classmates at McGill University in Montreal in the mid-‘20s; their friendship persisted and when Brown died suddenly of a heart attack in 1953 (in her prefatory note, written in 1953, Lewis talks of Brown in the present tense) his widow asked Edel, already in pursuit of James, to step in and see the work to completion. Indeed, the title page and dust-jacket to Knopf’s 1953 edition reads “By E.K.Brown, completed by Leon Edel.” Judging by these appreciative inscriptions, Edel was an invaluable Cather resource for both biographers.
(#1268 / #1269)
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