Guide to Reading Letter Transcriptions
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| Textual Feature | Appearance |
|---|---|
| passage deleted with a strikethrough mark | |
| passage deleted by overwritten added letters | |
| passage added above the line | passage with added text above |
| passage added on the line | passage with added text inline |
| passage added in the margin | passage with text added in margin |
| handwritten addition to a typewritten letter | typed passage with added handwritten text |
| missing or unreadable text | missing text noted with "[illegible]" |
| uncertain transcriptions | word[?] |
| notes written by someone other than Willa Cather | Note in another's hand |
| printed letterhead text | printed text |
| text printed on postcards, envelopes, etc. | printed text |
| text of date and place stamps | stamped text |
| passage written by Cather on separate enclosure. | written text |
Good Luck! You were most mysterious about your movements, but a nice letter about you just came from Mr. Wyer4, and he says you are in this part of the world now, at the present moment! Please give an account of yourself, young lady, and tell me which are your least occupied afternoons, and we'll make a date, and you can come down to the Jackson Square Library and ask where Bank street5 is, if you don't know. We must manage to have tea here some day very soon. I still need a Librarian!
Affectionately Willa Cather Miss Louise Guerber1 31 Oakland Avenue Upper Montclair3 N. J. NEW YORK, N. Y. STA 2 JAN 27 1926 10-AMInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let2865.xml
- Letter identifier
- 2865
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso. Includes one envelope, handwritten.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Louise Guerber1
- Date letter was written
- [January 26, 1926]
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Willa Cather Collection (Burroughs 26), Drew University Library, Special Collections and Archives, Madison, NJ
Individual Annotations
5 Bank Street (New York City): The apartment Cather shared with Edith Lewis beginning in 1912, located in Greenwich Village in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Subway construction forced Cather and Lewis to relocate in 1927.
Person Annotations
Burroughs, Ella Louise Guerber (1900-1985) (“Louise”). American librarian and curator. Ella Louise Guerber was born in Allentown, PA, and graduated from Cedar Crest College in 1919 and then the library school at Columbia University. At the time she met Cather in 1925, she was a reference librarian at the Denver Public Library and assisted Cather with her research on Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). In 1926, Guerber moved to New York City to take a position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she saw Cather frequently in person. She married Bryson Burroughs, Curator of Paintings, in 1928; he died in 1934. In 1950, when she received an honorary degree from Cedar Crest, she was Associate Curator of Paintings at the Met. After her retirement, she moved to Baltimore, MD, and then Princeton, NJ, where she died. Her friendship with Cather is documented by more than seventy letters from Cather to Burroughs from 1925 through Cather’s late life and by a diary documenting her in-person interactions with Cather from 1925 through 1927.
Wyer, Malcolm Glenn (1877-1965). Librarian. Malcolm Wyer was born in Kansas and grew up in Minnesota, graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1899. After graduating from the New York State Library School in Albany, NY, he became librarian at the University of Iowa (1904-1913), the University of Nebraska (1913-1924), and the Denver, CO, City Library (1924-1951). While in Denver he worked to strengthen the library’s collection of Western American history in cooperation with the University of Denver. Cather did research for Death Comes for the Archbishop at the Denver library in 1925, where she also met Louise Guerber Burroughs, who became a friend. Wyer married Charlotte Spalding in 1906; they had one daughter.
Place Annotations
