Team to lead NEH-funded project to digitize Cather letters

“Willa Cather ca. 1912 wearing necklace from Sarah Orne Jewett” by Photographer: Aime Dupont Studio, New York – Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Last year, the private musings of Willa Cather were made available to the masses for the first time in a book co-edited by UNL’s Andrew Jewell. About 550 of the famous author’s letters were published in “The Selected Letters of Willa Cather.” Scholars and fans greeted the book with excitement, but the volume contained only a fraction of the more than 3,000 pieces of correspondence that Jewell and co-editor Janis Stout had uncovered from various archives and collections around the world. Thanks to a three-year, $271,980 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, many more will be digitized and put online by the end of the decade. A new digital scholarly edition titled “The Complete Letters of Willa Cather” will be published online as part of the Willa Cather Archive, a venture of UNL’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. The digital edition of Cather letters is expected to launch in January 2018, when the letters are scheduled to enter the public domain.