The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis

Melissa J. Homestead

Professor, English and Program Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies 

University of Nebraska–Lincoln

 Willa Cather and Edith Lewis lived together in New York City for nearly forty years. While Cather built her career as a novelist, Lewis worked as a magazine editor and advertising writer while also, behind the scenes, editing Cather’s fiction. This lecture will give an overview of their personal and creative partnership as recovered in The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis (Oxford University Press 2021) and will also give special attention to their shared travels in the American Southwest that inspired Cather’s novels The Professor’s House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop. 

 Dr. Melissa J. Homestead is professor of English and Program Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies, where she also directs the Cather Project, co-edits The Complete Letters of Willa Cather, and co-directs A Digital Library of Willa Cather’s Literary Manuscripts. In addition to her many publications on Willa Cather, Homestead has published widely on American women’s writing from the colonial era through the nineteenth century. 

Dr. Homestead’s book, The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis,  is available from the Oxford University Press (global.oup.com/academic) or through your local bookshop (bookshop.org).

Here is the link for Melissa’s talk:            https://bit.ly/42h9VWQ

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