The Complete Letters of American Writer Willa Cather

FAIN: RQ-260744-18

University of Nebraska, Lincoln (Lincoln, NE 68503-2427)
Andrew Wade Jewell (Project Director: December 2017 to October 2022)

Work on the final stage of an online, open access edition of the complete correspondence of American novelist Willa Cather (1873-1947). (36 months)

We propose to edit American author Willa Cather’s complete correspondence for digital publication on the free and open-access Willa Cather Archive (cather.unl.edu). Thanks to previous NEH support, we are well on our way to completing the first stage of this edition. We are now asking for support to complete the edition so the remaining 1,500 letters--dispersed in over 70 repositories and full of tremendous detail about Cather's life, work, and relationships--can be included. This digital edition will feature texts transcribed and marked up in TEI P5 conformant XML, high-quality digital images of original documents, full multimedia annotations, and innovative search and browsing features including automatically-generated indices of names, titles, and geographic locations. The whole edition will be strengthened by its integration into the Willa Cather Archive, indisputably the central online resource for scholarly study of the author.

Associated Products

The Complete Letters of Willa Cather (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: The Complete Letters of Willa Cather
Author: Willa Cather
Abstract: The Complete Letters of Willa Cather is an endeavor to publish, for the first time, the collected correspondence of one of the most significant and widely-read American novelists of the twentieth century. The author of My Àntonia, A Lost Lady, The Professor's House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and many other celebrated books, Willa Cather was a woman with a compelling personal story, remarkable professional accomplishments, and a courageously independent life; her personal writings are of deep interest to many. The letters, long withheld from publication and even from quotation due to restrictions in Cather's will, provide unparalleled insight into the life, creative imagination, and professional and social context of this extraordinary woman. The project is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and with the cooperation of Willa Cather Foundation in Red Cloud, Nebraska.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://cather.unl.edu/writings/letters
Access Model: open access

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