In the quarter of a century since then, there have been dramatic shifts in Cather’s reputation. Fierce Cather wars have raged in the American literary and scholarly world, not entirely unlike the battles that are fought over Jane Austen’s legacy. The celebration of Cather as an American pastoralist, a kind of midwestern Robert Frost, which greeted her books when they were published, still continues. Since her death in 1947, many readers still take her to their hearts as the standardbearer of a sentimental nostalgia for vanished American values. It is an appropriation at odds with the harshness, violence, and cold truthfulness that run like dark steel through the calm, lyric simplicity of her writing.

But surely no justification is needed. Sixty-six years after Cather’s death, her story is known, her work is securely established, her biography has been written and rewritten. Setting aside her will was the right thing to do. She is a very great writer, and the more we know about her, the better. But should the writer’s last commands not be adhered to in perpetuity, you will ask? To which I can only reply that I admire and am grateful to Max Brod and Leonard Woolf for ignoring the final commands of Kafka and Virginia Woolf that their papers should be destroyed. And I look forward to a full biography of T.S. Eliot, even though he forbade it. Writers deserve all the after-lives they can get, if it means they continue to have readers.