This chapter describes Edith Lewis’s family history, childhood, and education as a background to her first meeting with Willa Cather in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1903. Because of Lewis’s deeply rooted New England family history, her Nebraska childhood, her elite eastern college education, and her plans to move to New York to pursue literary work, Cather found powerfully concentrated in Lewis two geographically located versions of the past she valued: the Nebraska of her own childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, and a New England–centered literary culture she encountered through reading. Cather also glimpsed in Lewis the future to which she herself aspired, the glittering promise of literary New York.
Literary Culture in Early New England. 1620-1730