Annotations from the Archive

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.

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! 

While Willa Cather was the member of the Cather family who shared life in early Nebraska with a reading public, she arrived with her parents a full decade after the first of her relatives settled down in the newly-formed Webster County. Several of our earliest collections feature museum objects and papers related to the lives of those early homesteaders, and we've talked about them in this series before.

As has been noted so often before, there exists within Willa Cather so many interesting dualities. She was intensely engaged with her small hometown, even as she became a traveler of the world; she was down-to-earth and plain spoken, but she enjoyed the niceties that her career afforded her—the fine clothes, the fascinating company. The Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Collection contains even more evidence of these dichotomies in Cather's nature.

Creating a culture of reading on the frontier wasn't easy! With days-long travel between towns, getting supplies of any kind—food, lumber, clothing, medicine—could be difficult and costly; it only stands to reason that reading materials like books and magazines might be considered a luxury.