Willa Cather
|| Naomi Shihab Nye || Flannery O'Connor || Katherine Anne Porter
Dorothy Scarborough || Gertrude Stein || Donna
Tartt || Mary Gladys Meredith Webb
Eudora Welty || Virginia
Woolf
Willa Cather, 1873-1947
Willa Cather was born in Virginia and lived in Nebraska, Pittsburgh, and New York.
After graduating from the University of Nebraska in 1891, she supported herself as a
journalist, as an editor for Home Monthly, and as a high school teacher. Her first
publication was April Twilights (1903), a book of poetry. She went on to write
twelve novels and numerous short stories, and also to serve as an editor to McClures
magazine. The Cather editions are part of the Larry McMurtry Collection, UNT Libraries,
Rare Book Room.
April Twilights. Boston: The Gorham Press, 1903. First edition.
Cathers first book.
The Troll Garden. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1905.
First edition, second issue.
A Lost Lady. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923. First edition,
first trade issue.
A Lost Lady. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923. First edition,
first issue.
The Professors House. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1925. First edition, first trade issue.
Death Comes for the Archbishop. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1927. First edition, first trade issue.
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Death Comes for the Archbishop. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1929. Illustrated edition with drawings by Harold Von Schmidt. |
Lucy Gayheart. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1935. First
edition, first trade issue.
Sapphira and the Slave Girl. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1940. First edition, first trade issue. |
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Naomi Shihab Nye
Award winning poet and Texas resident Naomi Shihab Nye graduated from Trinity
University (San Antonio 1974) and currently resides in San Antonio. Her publications on
display include several limited editions, fine press books by the Iguana Press.
On the Edge of the Sky. Madison: Iguana
Press, 1981. Limited edition of 190 copies.
Arabic Coffee. Madison: Iguana Press, 1986. Limited edition
of 200 copies.
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Invisible. [Denton, TX]: The
Trilobite Press, 1987. Printed in commemoration of a reading by Nye for the Friends of the
UNT Libraries. |
Tomorrow We Smile: A Short Story.
Madison: Iguana Press, 1990. Limited edition of 100 copies.
The Miracle of Typing. Madison: Iguana Press, 1991. Limited
edition of 200 copies.
Flannery OConnor, 1925-1964
Flannery OConnor, short story and novel writer, was born in
Georgia to a Catholic family. She attended Georgia State College and was later invited to
the Writers Workshop of the University of Iowa and Yaddo Artists Colony in Saratoga
Springs, New York. Through workshops, she met other well-known writers, including Robert
Lowell, John Crowe Ransom, and Elizabeth Hardwick. Her time in New York was cut short when
she contracted lupus and was forced to live with her mother in Milledgeville, Georgia, for
the remaining fifteen years of her life. There, she continued to write actively and
publish numerous short stories and two novels. Her writing, set in the Deep South, often
deals with religion in relationship to a loss of grace, and concentrates on dark,
sometimes fatal, aspects in human nature. A Good Man is Hard to Find is a
collection of some of OConnors best known stories, including her most well
known, "A Good Man is Hard to Find."
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A Good Man Is Hard to Find. New
York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955. First edition. |
Katherine Anne Porter,
1890-1980
Katherine Anne Porter was born in Indian Creek, Texas. The deaths of
her mother and grandmother left Porter and her four siblings with a financially destitute
father, and she and her sister began teaching classes in the dramatic arts to support
themselves. Porter married at age sixteen, but after nine years left for Chicago to pursue
a career in film. Unsuccessful, she turned to journalism and various other writing and
teaching jobs, and, subsequently, began writing short stories. During the 1920s and 1930s,
Porters fiction career flourished with the releases of her collected stories in Flowering
Judas and Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Her stories are often set in the southern
United States and Mexico, where she lived in the early 1930s.
My Chinese Marriage. New York: Duffield
and Company, 1921. First edition.
Released under the authorship of M.T.F (Mae M. Franking), My Chinese Marriage
was ghostwritten by Porter.
Flowering Judas. New York: Harcourt,
Brace and Company, 1930. First edition, limited to 600 copies.
Katherine Anne Porters French Song-Book.
Paris: Harrison of Paris, 1933. First edition.
Pale Horse, Pale Rider. New York: Harcourt, Brace
and Company, 1939. First edition. |
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Dorothy Scarborough, 1878-1935
Scarborough was born near Tyler, Texas, just after the
Reconstruction. In 1887, her family moved to Waco, where her father was elected to the
Board of Trustees of Baylor University. In 1896, she graduated from Baylor with an M.A. in
English and, in 1917, earned a Ph.D. from Columbia, where she later taught creative
writing. Beginning in 1923, she had several successful novels published. Later in life,
she turned her attention to folklore and obtained a grant from Columbia to collect Anglo
ballads in Virginia and North Carolina (1930). Her two folklore publications, On the
Trail of Negro Folksong and A Song Catcher in the Southern Mountains, continue
to be regarded as standard references.
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In the
Land of Cotton. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1923. First edition.
Set in Waco, Scarborough's first novel was a product of Scarboroughs
fieldwork and research into the sharecropping system in Texas. |
The Wind. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1925. First
edition.Scarboroughs second novel is set in Sweetwater, Texas, during a drought
in the mid-1880s. It focuses on the "harsh environment of the West and its impact on
a delicate and sensitive heroine from Virginia. The heroine, Letty, is ultimately driven
to madness, murder, and suicide by the combined elemental and demonic forces of the wind
and sand. Scarborough fully utilized her training and background as a folklorist in this
dramatic novel, weaving snatches of folksong, regional legends, and the ballad image of
the Demon Lover. As a publicity stunt, the novel was first published anonymously. The ploy
backfired, however, because Texans were outraged by their assumption that a Yankee had
written this scathing attack on their beloved state" (Grider). |
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Gertrude Stein, 1874-1946
Novelist, short story writer, essayist, and playright, Stein was the avant-garde,
central figure in the American literary scene in Paris during the first half of the
twentieth century. Steins Geographical History resulted out her reflections
on the makings of literary masterpieces.
The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human
Nature to the Human Mind. New York: Random House, 1936. First edition.
Donna Tartt
Donna Tartt was born in Mississippi in 1963
and attended the University of Mississippi in Oxford and Bennington College in Vermont. The
Secret History, her first novel, involves the murder of a college student by his Greek
classmates at a small Vermont college. After its publication in 1992, the novel quickly
became a bestseller, and Knopf was forced to reprint thousands of copies to meet public
demand
The Secret History. New York: Knopf, 1992. Advanced
readers edition, uncorrected proofs..
Mary Gladys Meredith Webb,
1881-1927
Novelist, short story writer, and poet, Mary Webb depicted her native Shropshire in
realistic detail through her writings, concentrating on the mysticism of the natural
landscape in relation to human nature. At age twenty, she was diagnosed with Graves
disease, which eventually caused her early death. Her most well-known novel is Precious
Bane, which was adapted for television by PBS. Webbs novels have recently
regained popularity, and most have been reprinted as Verago Modern Classics by the Dial
Press. First editions of her major works are held in the Gustine Weaver Collection, UNT
Libraries, Rare Book Room.
"The White Moth." Original typescript signed.
The Golden Arrow. London: Constable, 1916. First edition.
Gone to Earth. London: Constable and Company, 1917. First
edition.
The Spring of Joy: A Little Book of Healing. London and
Toronto: J.M. Dent & Sons; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1917. First edition.
Precious Bane: A Novel. London: Jonathan Cape, 1924. First
edition.
Armour Wherein He Trusted. London: Jonathan Cape, 1929. First
edition.
"George Meredith in His Novels: An Appreciation." Typescript
with pencil corrections in hand of author, written for the Meole Brace Literary Society,
accompanied by an autographed letter of authentication from Henry Bertram Law Webb, dated
18 Nov. 1936.
The Chinese Lion. London: Bertram Rota, 1937. First edition.
Eudora Welty, 1909-
Eudora Welty was born in Mississippi and has spent most of her life there. She attended
Mississippi State College for Women and the University of Wisconsin, where she majored in
English (1929) and decided to become a writer. Encouraged by her mother to find
employment, she worked in radio, advertising, journalism, and photography. During her
various jobs, she continued to write and, in 1936, had her story "Death of a
Traveling Salesman" published in Manuscript. Publications in the Southern
Review and Prairie Schooner followed, and in 1941 Doubleday published her
collected stories in A Curtain of Green. She went on to write both novels and short
stories. In 1972, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Optimists Daughter.
Most of her writings take place in her native Mississippi, where she currently resides.
A Curtain of Green. New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company,
1941. First edition.
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The Golden Apples. New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1949. First edition. |
The Robber Bridegroom. New York: Doubleday, Doran
& Company, 1942. First edition. |
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The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories. New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955. First edition.
Virginia Woolf, 1882-1941
Viginia Woolf is now considered one of the preeminant modern
novelists. She, along with her husband Leonard, was a member of the Bloomsbury group, a
handful of writers and artists who originally met at Cambridge. In 1917, she and Leonard
bought a small handpress with the intent to publish their own writings as well as those of
their writer friends. Under the name The Hogarth Press, the Woolfs published works
by Sigmund Freud, Katherine Mansfied, and T.S. Eliot. The press gave Virginia the freedom
to write what she wanted.
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The Waves. London: The Hogarth
Press, 1931. First edition. Often compared with James Joyce, she chose to
experiment with narrative form and stream of consciousness in her novels, including The
Waves. The dust jacket for The Waves was designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell. |
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