It is reasonable to expect some howling dark secret to leap from the pages of Willa Cather’s letters, so long and zealously withheld from the prying eyes of the reading public have these letters been, and by Cather’s imperious command. As so often happens with such well-publicized delays—T. S. Eliot’s letters are a comparable case—the curiosity of readers can be pretty much exhausted by the time the letters are finally loosed upon the scene, less with a bang than a whimper. Nothing in Cather’s letters, frank and readable and (at their bracing best) angry and indignant as they often are, is likely to inspire readers not already so inclined to turn to Cather’s sparkling and still arresting novels. And that is a pity, since Cather is one of our very greatest novelists. For imaginative intensity, idiosyncrasy of vision, and even structural experimentation—“our writers experiment too little,” she complained in a letter in 1931—she is right there at the top, with Hawthorne and Melville, Wharton and James, Faulkner and Bellow.
