Andrew Jewell on Willa Cather's Life and Letters

November Daytime Program

Presented by the Caxton Club and the Union League Club of Chicago

Andrew Jewell

She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for literature. Savaged by Ernest Hemingway. Associated with the Great Plains, though she lived most of her life in New York. Is often first encountered in high school English classes where students are introduced to My Antonia. 

She was Willa Cather and she’ll come to life for us through the letters (nearly 3,000), writings, images, and more which are housed at the Willa Cather Archive at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Our guide will be the archive’s director, Andrew Jewell, who will draw on its unmatched resources to tell her story — often through her own words.

"I am getting out from under now, and yesterday boldly went forth and had my hair washed with no ill effects.”

Willa Cather

April 1942

Dr. Jewell also serves as a Co-Director of the university’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and is a professor in the university libraries. Much published, he co-edited The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (Knopf, 2013). 

Why not go boldly forth and make your reservation today?