Sue Hallgarth's Blog

Willa Cather’s childhood home in Red Cloud, MN, is fully renovated and now open to the public. Read more….

Source

So many of the characters and events in Death Comes are based on the lives of actual people, readers might enjoy finding out more about them. The first two books, on John Dunn and Arthur Rochford Manby, are brief biographies. The third contains stories by D.H. Lawrence, one of which, “The Woman who Rode Away,” features Lawrence’s slanted, fictional view of Mabel Dodge Luhan. The fourth and fifth...

Source

Sue Hallgarth read from her latest book, Death Comes: A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery, at the Cather International Seminar in Winchester, VA (June 17–21, 2019). Wonderful gathering: We met old friends and made new ones!

Source

Mabel Dodge Luhan built the ‘Big House,’ at 240 Morada Lane in Taos, NM, between 1917 and 1922. It is now a National Historic Landmark. Employing traditional Puebloan construction methods, Tony Luhan oversaw the building of the three-story adobe house for Mabel and married her in 1923. The Big House, which backs onto land owned by the Taos Pueblo, has more than twenty rooms, including...

Source

Aside from the connections between D.H. Lawrence and Mabel Dodge Luhan—and between the Kiowa Ranch near San Cristobal that Mabel Dodge Luhan traded for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers and her famous adobe compound in Taos—I chose to use the D.H. Lawrence ranch as one of the main settings in Death Comes because Willa Cather and Edith Lewis visited Lawrence there in the summer of 1925, because it...

Source

Willa Cather and Edith Lewis occupied this small house, “the pink adobe,” across from the “big” house at Mabel and Tony Luhan’s in Taos for two weeks during the summer of 1925 and (probably) 1926. It had five rooms and two kiva fireplaces. They enjoyed staying there so much in the summer of 1925 that Willa asked to return the following summer. Cather insisted on paying for...

Source

Lèon Bakst (1866-1924) and Nicolai Fechin (1881-1955), both born and educated in Russia, produced the two portraits of Willa Cather known to have been painted during her lifetime. Bakst was already well-known as a scene and costume designer associated with Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russe in Paris. He was also a portrait painter. When the Omaha Society of Fine Arts asked Cather to choose a...

Source

2 pm visiting author event, with Hampton Sides, Valerie Plame, Anne Hillerman, and more… op cit books–Santa Fe 157 Paseo de Peralta Santa Fe NM  505.428.0321 map

Source

Posted by Sue Hallgarth on February 18, 2014 For twenty years Willa Cather and Edith Lewis spent their summer months at Whale Cove Cottages on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, Canada. They reached Grand Manan by ferry. Current ferries are considerably larger and better equipped than the one Cather and Lewis used. The Grand Manan V pictured below just passing Swallowtail Lighthouse is capable of...

Source

Posted by Sue Hallgarth on November 4, 2013 When I first visited Grand Manan in the 1990s and found the restored Cather Cottage at Whale Cove, this is what it looked like from the edge of the Red Trail (one of the many hiking trails on the island). Situated a few hundred feet from the edge of a cliff, the cottage faced the Bay of Fundy whose fifty-foot tides quietly rose and fell at the base of...

Source