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Volume 25, Number 1, Spring 2018
Books&People

The Writer & Her Editor
IN THIS ISSUE

The Membership of Willa Cather & Edith Lewis

Harriet Shapiro, Head of Exhibitions

One day in 1928, a lady dressed in an apple-green coat and matching hat climbed the
A Royal Bequest
PAGE 3 steps to the New York Society Library, then located downtown at University Place.
“I’d like to subscribe here if I may,” the visitor said. “My name is Cather. I’m by way
of being a writer.”

When the American novelist Willa Cather subscribed to the Library, she joined the ranks
of other distinguished member writers from Washington Irving to Herman Melville,
Stephen Vincent Benét, and W.H. Auden. Less well known is the fact that Willa Cather
Earth Day Book Recommendations shared the membership with her lifelong companion Edith Lewis, a successful editor and
PAGE 4
advertising executive in New York City.

Yellow charging cards on display in our exhibition The New York World of Willa Cather
list the 311 books the couple withdrew between March 1937 and February 1947. Cards
dated 1928 to 1937 were either lost or destroyed during the Library’s 1937 move from
What’s New with YA University Place to its current location. Subscriber information, handwritten in black ink
PAGE 6 at the head of the cards, lists two names, an address and a telephone number: Miss Edith
Lewis, Miss Cather, 570 Park Avenue, Apt. 7D, RE 4-8354. Cather was the couple’s public
face, but Lewis was a crucial presence, though not always entirely appreciated for the
role she played in Cather’s creative life.

As the charging cards reveal, the membership Cather and
Lewis shared for nearly twenty years was an expression
of a lifelong partnership. An in-depth study of the Cather-
Lewis collaboration by Professor Melissa Homestead of
the University of Nebraska-Lincoln will be published
in 2020 by Oxford University Press. As Homestead said
recently, “There’s been this notion of Cather as an autono-
mous artist who did everything by herself. It’s been hard
for people to think about her actually collaborating.” Of
their editorial collaboration, Homestead writes that it
“produced the polished and tightly constructed prose long
recognized by readers as Cather’s hallmark.” Indeed, Lewis
was instrumental in editing Cather’s works for publica-
tion. As Robert Thacker, professor of Canadian Studies and
English at St. Lawrence University, points out, Lewis was
deeply involved in what he describes as “Willa Cather Inc.”