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By the 1930s, Cather was one of the most well-known authors in the United States.
But that didn't prevent her from feeling the kind of fragility and loss that everyone feels as they grow older.
I want to share a little bit today with a letter she wrote to her brother in 1938 which gets to the more fragile side of her.
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CATHER'S VOICE: As for me, I have cared too much about people and places, cared too hard.
It made me as a writer, but it will break me in the end.
I feel as if I couldn't go another step.
People say I have a classic style.
A few of them know it's the heat under the simple words that counts.
I early learned that if you loved your theme enough, you could be as mild as a May morning and still make other people care,
people in countries who read it in the strangest languages, Hungarian and Romanian are the latest.
Someday you must come and see my whole bookcase of translations.
It's the one thing that simple really caring for an old Margie, an old cat, an old anything.
I never cultivated it, from the age of twenty on I did all I could to repress it and that effort of mine did, after years, give me a fairly good style,
style being merely the writer, no the person himself;
what he was born with and what he has done for himself.
When Cather wrote that, her brother Douglas and her good friend Isabelle had just died
and she was working what would become her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl.
From the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Archives, I'm Andy Jewell.
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