Ideally, a biography is meant to give the reader a true feeling of what the subject was really like. For Willa Cather, there is perhaps no biography that does this better than the account of her life by Edith Lewis, who knew, and lived with, Willa Cather for well over 40 years. At 197 pages (in the original edition) this book is short by biography standards; yet, reading it, I came away with a greater feeling of what Willa Cather was like than in all of the other biographies on her that I have read.
We get great personal details in such passages as: "I think Willa Cather never got so much happiness from the writing of any book as from the Archbishop; and although Shadows on the Rock is of course altogether different in conception, in treatment, and in artistic purpose, it may have been in part a reluctance to leave that world of Catholic feeling and tradition in which she had lived so happily for so long that led her to embark on this new novel." (Pg. 155)
Or, "...Willa Cather had a great distaste for luxury hotels...She was extremely gloomy and discontented, even resentful, the first day or two [at a particular luxury hotel], as if she had been cheated out of all the things she had come back to Aix-les-Bains to find. It was not until we removed to the plain, old-fashioned Grand Hotel down in the town...that she recovered her happy spirits." (pg. 159-160) (Indeed, Cather loved her extremely austere, pastoral summer cottage at Grand Manan, Canada; which was purposefully rustic and simple, but where she spent a great deal of time.)
Or, "When her [Cather's] brother Roscoe's twin daughters were babies, and she went out to Wyoming to visit him, she never tired of playing with them. She played with children, not as if she were a grown person, but as children play--with the same spirit of experiment, of adventurousness and unreflecitng enjoyment." (pg. 169)
Or, "She was a little tired that morning [of her death]; full of winning courtely to those around her; fearless, serene--with the childlike simplicity which had always accompanied her greatness; giving and recieiving happiness." (pg. 197)
This biography is recently back in print (I had to scour and search to get my edition), which begs the question: how could such a fine biography--written by Cather's life-long friend and house-mate--written on perhaps America's finest writer, have gone out of print in the first place?
