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Location on door: front, panel 2
MARGARET BADOLLET CALDWELL SHOTWELL
The Nebraska-born poet Margaret Badollet Caldwell Shotwell (dates unknown) was an active participant in Omaha literary circles. She helped to initiate "Nebraska Writers' Week" in 1923, wrote the weekly column "Bibliophile by Badollet" in the Omaha Daily News, and published a volume of verse entitled Felicia Says in 1924. She created some controversy when she wrote a poem critical of a portrait of Willa Cather that had been commissioned for the Omaha Public Library. The city asked Cather to select the artist, and she chose Leo Bakst. Shotwell's poem was published in the Omaha Daily News, and was so controversial that it was reprinted not long after in Publishers Weekly. Critic Vicki Martin, who gathered these facts for an article on the incident, writes that "while the poem seems to be predicting dissatisfaction with the portrait by the people who commissioned it, it actually is responsible for creating a great deal of that dissatisfaction."
We have not yet found an artifact related to Margaret Badollet Caldwell Shotwell in the Ransom Center collections.