National Willa Cather Center News

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Visit this page often for the latest Cather-related news as well as information about the Willa Cather Foundation's programs, collections, and events.

Annotations from the Archives: The Cather Family Library

February 6, 2024

The Cather Family Library, as it has come to be called in the last decade or more, is another part of the National Willa Cather Center’s collection of books associated with the extended Cather family. The Cather Family Library, however, provides especially rich insights into the mind and imagination of Willa Cather. A number of books in the collection contain personalization that denotes a book belonged to Willa Cather personally, who sometimes used "Willie" or "William" when marking her copies.


Annotations from the Archive: Association Copies

January 3, 2024

The National Willa Cather Center’s archives contain numerous book collections, and scattered throughout them are some of our most precious and valuable archival objects: our association copies. Coming from many different collections, our association copies help us—and by extension, Cather readers and researchers—understand Willa Cather’s relationships with her readers, her family and social networks, and the larger literary and publishing world.


Annotations from the Archive: The Willa Cather Childhood Home

December 5, 2023

The reopening of the Willa Cather Childhood Home this month is the culmination of more than two years of planning, research, and parallel work on both the house itself and the collections that have been housed within it since the 1960s. BVH Architecture assembled an excellent team to examine the long history of the home, which was built in 1879 and has undergone many changes in the past 145 years; the team utilized many resources from our archive to search for clues about how the house was constructed, updated, and used over the years.


Annotations from the Archives: Cather in Santa Fe

November 7, 2023

In the 1910s and 1920s, Willa Cather made several trips to New Mexico, sometimes staying for weeks as she visited friends and relatives, traveling both for pleasure and for research. In the spring of 1926, Cather was reviewing the proofs of My Mortal Enemy and at the same time, finishing the writing of Death Comes for the Archbishop; the novel was slated for serial publication in The Forum beginning in January 1927 and as a Knopf book the following September.


Annotations from the Archives: American Archives Month

October 3, 2023

Since 2006, the Society of American Archivists and archivists across the United States have celebrated American Archives Month, a collaborative effort by professional organizations and repositories around the nation to highlight the importance of preserving papers of lasting value. Archivists are professionals who assess, organize, preserve, and provide access to these papers—which might include letters, financial or political documents, photos, manuscripts, or publications of many types. The archives at the National Willa Cather Center contain all of these, and more! 


50 Years of the Centennial Willa Cather Stamp

September 6, 2023
In 1969, the Willa Cather Foundation Board of Governors pursued a series of postage stamps to commemorate the 1973 centennial of Willa Cather’s birth; the goal was to have the first stamps offered for sale in Red Cloud on December 7, 1973. What resulted four years later was a single 8 cent stamp with Cather’s likeness. Following are excerpts of that process gleaned from past newsletters.