National Willa Cather Center News

It was a beautiful, breezy afternoon on June 8 for our Willa Cather Childhood Home Rededication and Ribbon Cutting! Willa Cather Foundation leadership, project partners and supporters, Nebraska State Poet Matt Mason, and Nebraska Youth Poet Laureate Miranda Davis participated in a dedication and ribbon-cutting at the Willa Cather Childhood Home.

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.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced in October that Willa Cather’s My Ántonia was among the fifty titles selected for their 2024 NEA Big Read.

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.

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.

After an extensive sixteen-month restoration, the Willa Cather Childhood Home reopened for tours on December 7, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s 150th birthday.

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.

Invitation to Bid

General Contractor for Porch Restoration
J.L. Miner House | 241 North Seward St.
Red Cloud, Nebraska 68970

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!