“We Are the Only Wonderful Things”

Abstract

After losing their Greenwich Village apartment in 1927, Cather and Lewis had no permanent home in New York City, living together instead at the Grosvenor Hotel when both were in the city. In 1932, they finally leased an apartment on Park Avenue. The first half of this chapter reconstructs their life together in the 1930s and 1940s living on Park Avenue and traveling to Europe and Mt. Desert Island in Maine. The chapter includes their responses to the Great Depression and World War II, the formation of new friendships and maintenance of old ones, the deeper intertwining of their families, and Cather’s declining health. After describing Cather’s death and burial, the second half of the chapter tells the story of Edith Lewis’s mourning for Cather in the years immediately after Cather’s death and her work as Cather’s literary executor.