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Upon Willa Cather’s passing her life companion Edith Lewis was dealing with something more than Truman Capote’s plagiarism of Willa’s works. Truman’s proclivity to abuse was going further over the line than that even in the early years and would become more persistent and assuming as the years passed despite Edith’s efforts to ward him off in public perception without drawing overt attention to the problem, just awareness and protecting Willa and the nature of the literature. As far as the public could see, that wasn’t much of a problem in that Truman was making sure that he was the most famous person with the identity of ‘writer,’ certainly a free landscape to enter, and his presumed connection to Willa...

The distilled ardor, the astonished, silenced respect, hangs in the air as Willa Cather describes her “A Chance Meeting” with “’Caro’ of the Lettres à sa Nièce Caroline,” Flaubert’s niece whom he raised and of whom he wrote. For Willa what was so unexpectedly happening in this auspicious encounter was laden with the immensity of her own childhood literary personal history looking back at her, speaking to her. They had this shared childhood in a summit of literature, and here now was the little girl, now as an old woman who had lived that reality in the very home of Flaubert as the works were being written, and an eloquent and learned Caroline, too, a help in that. Willa, who had...