Although forty years have passed since the death of Willa Cather in , she never has been the subject of a full-length biography. When she died, her reputation was firmly established as one of the most significant American novelists, and during the succeeding decades her stature has continued to grow. At the time of her death J. Donald Adams wrote in the New York Times that "no American novelist was more purely an artist," and George Whicher declared four years later that "no American writer.
While no biography ever can be definitive, this study contains a great deal more material than any previous one and goes considerably beyond my own earlier biography, as well as the efforts of others, in presenting a life-size portrait of this remarkable woman.
When E. Brown's biography of Cather appeared in , Alfred Knopf wrote on the jacket: "Here is all the biographical information anyone is likely ever to gather about Willa Cather.
He was wrong, of course, and since Cather died there has been a steady accumulation of material to fuel the ever-growing interest in her life and work. Hundreds of pages of Cather's journalistic writings have been dug from the dusty magazine and newspaper files where they first appeared and republished. All of her stories have been collected, including many she gladly would have expunged from the record if she could have.
She left a trail of published interviews and speeches and public statements that surprises anyone who knows only her own pronouncements desiring privacy. Perhaps fifteen hundred of her letters by now have found their way into institutional collections from Maine to California, even though she and Edith Lewis destroyed as many of her letters as they could lay their hands on. Fortunately, correspondents who outlived her had the good sense to realize that Cather belongs to the world and her letters ought to be preserved.
