As part of the Big Read and its celebration of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, Franklin Pierce University will welcome Dr. Andrew Jewell, co-editor of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, to its Rindge campus on Oct. 6 at 6 p.m. in Spagnuolo Hall to discuss his book and why he defied Willa Cather’s last wishes to not have her letters published upon her death.
The event is free and open to the public.
When she died in 1947, Cather left a will forbidding the publication of her personal letters. As a result, for more than sixty years, Willa Cather’s letters were withheld from the public. After the death of Cather’s nephew and the will’s executor, her will expired, and Drs. Jewell and Stout published more than 500 of her letters. The volume offers valuable information to scholars and readers, as Dr. Jewell will discuss when he visits Franklin Pierce. Before this volume of collected letters, scholars ventured to almost 75 archives that housed the Cather letters.
Franklin Pierce is one of 77 Big Read grants recipients chosen by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) across the nation this year. The book chosen for promotion by the university is Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, in large part because of Cather’s frequent visits to the Monadnock area, where she wrote during summers and early autumns.
A program of the National Endowment for the Arts, the NEA Big Read broadens people’s understanding of the world through the joy of reading. Franklin Pierce is the first university in New Hampshire to receive a Big Read grant, and the university has also partnered with the Ingalls Library in Rindge, and the Mariposa Museum in Peterborough, for events over the course of the year.
For more information on Big Read events, contact Dr. Donna Decker at 899-4296 or via email deckerd@franklinpierce.edu.