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Sky on the road to Red Cloud
Volume 25, Number 2, Summer 2018
Books&People
Willa Cather’s Red Cloud:
IN THIS ISSUE
A Trip Back in Time
by Catherine McGowan, Circulation Librarian
The Goodhue Society photographs by Harriet Shapiro, Head of Exhibitions
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The Library’s current exhibition, The New York World of Willa Cather, for which
curator Harriet Shapiro and I have been giving weekly gallery talks, led us to want to
know more about Cather’s Red Cloud, Nebraska, world. It figures as the setting
(variously renamed) in six of her twelve novels, which are often peopled by her Red
Cloud neighbors (also renamed). In a recent whirlwind excursion, we visited the Willa
New Book Funds Cather archive at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and spent a day in Red Cloud
PAGE 7 and the surrounding countryside seeing important sites that figured in Cather’s life.
Experiencing Red Cloud, one can understand the love of the land that Cather grew to
know, as well as her need to move on to the world beyond. The wide-open Nebraska
landscape and the people she knew there inspired her, but in a letter written in January
of 1896, her heading states that she is writing from “Siberia (Red Cloud).”
Remembering
Beloved Authors
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Willa Cather’s childhood home A creek where the Cather children played
