3 Review(s)

Drawing on archives only recently made available, this book both explores a previously unknown chapter in Willa Cather's life and offers the first full portrait of two artists whose lives are as fascinating as they are unbelievable. Earl Brewster and Achsah Barlow met as New York art students, married in 1910, and spent the remainder of their lives painting and writing in Europe and India: Deeply spiritual and often impecunious, they nonetheless managed to live stylishly and to attract the friendship of people like Cather, D. H. Lawrence, and the Nehru family. Although their friendship with Lawrence is well known, that with Cather has only now come to light, though it extended from the early 1900s until Cather's death in 1947, and had a profound impact on Cather and her writing. The book concludes with a representative sampling of the Brewster-Cather materials that this book explores for the first time. Illustrated with four color plates and five black-and-white illustrations. Lucy Marks is special editions cataloger at Drew University Library. David Porter is the Tisch Family Distinguished Scholar at Skidmore College, where he teaches in the classics, English, and music departments.