Willa Cather Portrait Print

Own your own matted portrait of one of the most iconic images taken of Willa Cather in 1921, by George Marsden of Rinehart-Marsden Studio, Omaha, Nebraska [PHO-58-003: Willa Cather Foundation Special Collections and Archives at the National Willa Cather Center, Bernard and Nancy Picchi Collection]

Matted and suitable for framing.

Image Size — 7.5" x 9.5"
Paper Size — 11" x 14"

The photograph, taken when Cather was almost 48, was taken at the height of her career and the start of her most prodigious decade as a writer, when she wrote One of Ours (1922), A Lost Lady (1923), April Twilights & Other Poems (1923), The Professor's House (1925), My Mortal Enemy (1928), and Death Comes to the Archbishop (1927), 

Willa Cather wrote in a letter to her friend Irene Miner Weisz on November 10, 1921: "Some of the photographs taken in Omaha turned out very well indeed. I am going to order a lot, and you shall have several of them." [Irene Miner Weisz Papers, 1912-1958 (Midwest MS Cather-Weisz), Newberry Library, Chicago, IL]

She had written to her editor, Alfred K. Knopf in September, requesting promotional images for the lecture tour that she embarked on that autumn. They did not arrive in time and it can be surmised that she sat for a series of portrait photographs for press demands:

"I am to open the Fine Arts Society 'season' in Omaha on the 29th of November. As such things go, it is an 'important event'; people are going up tp Omaha from all over the state. The Programme Committee plan to run photographs of me, and advertising matter, in the Sunday papers for some weeks before the lecture. I have no photographs with me; can't you help me out? The advertising is really too good to lose. I hate to speak, loathe doing it, and as I am really [illegible] doing it out of consideration for my publishers and not for any pleasure of mine, I think they ought to back me up.

Won't you please send cuts to the enclosed address, and send them by first class post to insure quick delivery? If you can possiby have a cut made of the Hoppe photograph you bought, won't you please do so? They will publish all the pictures they can get, and I had only one snap shot to send them. This sudden rush of love on the part of Nebraskans is undoubtedly due to the kind offices and personal canvas of Sinclair Lewis, but I think it will affect the sale of my next book considerably. Nebraskans are terribly afraid of being out of anything. I have had to decline to speak at eleven clubs, on my own terms, and the long distance telephone drives me to desperation!

...Just now I am working hard on the 'Nation' article, which the enclosed letter will explain. That is, I work when the women's Clubs let me alone for a day."

[Cather-Knopf Correspondence, The Dobkin Family Collection of Feminism, New York, NY]