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The Writer and her Editor: continued
Greetings from
the Head Librarian
I greatly enjoy my 6-8 hours a week
on the Reference Desk. They give me
the opportunity to meet and greet
members and even to maintain my
librarian chops by answering some
actual reference inquiries. Not surpris- and Lewis traveled frequently, but when they were in town they visited the
ingly, the questions I am asked most
often are “where is the restroom?”
(nonmembers) and “what’s new at
the Library?” (members).
Since you ask, here’s what’s new:
Share a glass of wine, snacks, and good
cheer at our member happy hour every
third Wednesday of the month, 5:30pm
in the Whitridge Room!
Join curator Harriet Shapiro on a
Tuesday or Thursday for a free gallery
talk about The New York World of Willa
Cather. Check the schedule online or
posted in the building.
Need more time with checked-out
books? You’re in luck: we’ve increased
the renewal period to four weeks.
Convey your love of the Library by
sending our beautiful new postcards,
featuring the building and our current
exhibit. They’re on sale at the Circula- Russian literature also played an important role in Cather’s literary develop-
tion Desk at $1.50 each or 5 for $6.
We’re also making critical improvements
to the online event registration process,
and to the readability of our website
and e-news, so that their responsive
design will adapt to your phone, tablet,
laptop, or full-sized monitor.
No doubt by the time you read this
there will be something new to share,
so stop by the Reference Desk and say
hello. And hey, I’ll also take an honest- and Byron, all translated into English by Hamish Miles. On January 2, 1940,
to-goodness reference question!
—Carolyn Waters, Head Librarian
When the couple joined the Library in 1928, Cather was securely established in
the pantheon of great American writers. A winner of the 1923 Pulitzer Prize, she
had gained renown for her early works, O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and
My Ántonia, novels celebrating the pioneer experience in the Midwest, as well as
for One of Ours, My Mortal Enemy, and Death Comes for the Archbishop.
The Library had been in Cather’s sightlines for many years. In the early 1900s,
newly arrived in New York City, she worked at McClure’s Magazine on East 23
Street, only a few blocks from the Library’s University Place location. Friends
in Cather’s circle, including her former boss S.S. McClure, journalist Ida Tarbell,
and McClure’s fiction editor Viola Roseboro’, were all Library members. Cather
Library on an average of once a week, often borrowing several books at a time.
Photo by Harriet Shapiro
Books checked out by Cather and Lewis.
Much has been written about Cather’s early passion for literature. She remem-
bered listening to her grandmother Rachel Boak read The Pilgrim’s Progress
aloud to her during her childhood in Frederick County, Virginia. She was ten
when the family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska; and much later told Lewis
that she reread The Pilgrim’s Progress eight times during those first winters.
One significant resource was the family library, which contained 19th-century
classics by Dickens, Thackeray, Poe, and Hawthorne, as well as volumes of
Shakespeare and anthologies of poetry. According to Thacker, “Cather was not
only a writer who valued Western tradition in literature, she embraced it.”
ment. She was fourteen when she found paperback editions of Tolstoy in the
drugstore where she worked after school. Cather recalls reading him “furiously.”
On December 5, 1941, Cather/Lewis withdrew Tolstoy’s Resurrection, six days
later Forty-Three Tales, and, on January 24, 1945, The Invader and Other Stories.
In the last decade of her life it seemed as if Cather was returning once again to
the books she had loved as a girl.
Cather’s interest in French literature also emerges as one of the themes of the
charging cards. She began reading French when she was fifteen, but her oral
command of the language was never fluent. The cards reveal that between 1937
and 1947, Cather/Lewis borrowed a number of biographies by the French writer
André Maurois, including Disraeli: A Picture of the Victorian Age; Voltaire;
Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars, translated by Lewis Galantière, was also
checked out. Two titles withdrawn in French were Stendhal’s La Chartreuse
de Parme and Pascal’s Les Pensées.
During the late spring of 1938, Cather turned repeatedly to the Library while
researching Sapphira and the Slave Girl, her twelfth and last novel, which draws
PAGE 2 - Spring 2018 Books & People