Join Dr. Amy Fahey and moderator Dr. Raymond Hain for a virtual conversation on the literary friendship between Catholic convert and Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset and Willa Cather, whose novels often explored Catholic themes with profound insight.

“It gives me pleasure to know that we both have strong and loyal love for the same things. That gives a strong foundation to friendship.” When Cather wrote to Undset in 1941, the world was engulfed in war, and both women, despite their literary triumphs, had endured profound suffering and loss. Their friendship remained a source of consolation and sustenance.

What are those “same things” loved so fiercely by this Pulitzer Prize-winning author and this Nobel Laureate? And what was the nature of a friendship that began well before they were first introduced by Alfred Knopf in 1940 and endured until Cather’s death seven years later?

Dr. Fahey and Dr. Hain will delve deeper into a friendship rooted not simply in shared literary endeavors or a shared American publisher, but in a mutual love of those things that nurture and sustain human flourishing: family, culture, the beauty of the created order, and a belief in Someone beyond the unencumbered self.

There remained, of course, one thing they did not share—Undset’s Catholic faith. But a look at their extant work and correspondence, and especially the few surviving fragments of Cather’s final novel, “Hard Punishments,” reveals to us that even there, the sympathies were broad and deep.

This event is free and open to the public.