Beth Gutcheon at the Hudson Review:
Although the Cather nuts among us are puzzled that she is not taught, and therefore read, as much as, say, Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Cather has actually had plenty of biographical and scholarly attention since her death in 1947. Within six years, her lifelong companion and literary executrix Edith Lewis had brought out Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record (Knopf, 1953), and her friend Elizabeth Sergeant produced Willa Cather: A Memoir (Lippincott, 1953). That same year, Knopf published E. K. Brown’s Willa Cather: A Critical Biography, a work authorized by Lewis and finished by Leon Edel when Professor Brown died young and in harness. In 1970, James Woodress contributed Willa Cather: Her Life and Art, a wonderful if briefish study, to something called the Pegasus American Authors series. In 1986 Oxford University Press published Sharon O’Brien’s Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, and the 1980s also saw both a full-length biography from Woodress from the University of Nebraska Press and a definitive full treatment from the British critic and literary biographer Hermione Lee (Willa Cather: Double Lives) from Pantheon. Cather has also in recent decades been the subject of considerations at various lengths by Joan Acocella, Vivian Gornick, Toni Morrison, Katherine Anne Porter, Phyllis Rose, and Eudora Welty, among others. Clearly, she has always been a writer’s writer.
more here.