Webb Institute’s Assistant Dean and John J. McMullen Professor of Humanities, Dr. Richard Harris, recently had two articles published on the American novelist Willa Cather.
Cather, known as one of the most important American novelists of the first half of the twentieth century, was born in Virginia in 1873 and settled in Webster County, Nebraska, in 1883. Before her passing in 1947, Cather wrote twelve novels, six collections of short fiction, two editions of a book of poetry, and nine works of nonfiction and collected journalism, speeches, and letters.
Harris’s first article, entitled “Thackeray’s Henry Esmond and The Virginians: Source Materials for Cather’s My Mortal Enemy,” came out of a paper he delivered in 2011 at the 13th Willa Cather International Seminar at Smith College in Massachusetts. That article was published in Cather Studies, Volume 10 in 2015. His second recent published work about Cather, entitled “Willa Cather and the Art of ‘Recoverable Contexts’: Source Materials for One of Ours,” was published in early 2016 in the Willa Cather Newsletter & Review. That article was based on a paper he presented at a Cather Symposium in Rome, Italy, in June 2014. Another article, “Willa Cather, Howard Pyle, and ‘The Precious Message of Romance,’” will appear in Cather Studies, Volume 11 later this year. Professor Harris also was a plenary speaker and a panelist at the 61st Cather Spring Conference in Nebraska in the first week in June. His paper was titled “Willa Cather’s ‘Doomed’ Novel: One of Ours and the Romance and Reality of War.”