Margaret Badollet Shotwell (October 20, 1922)

#0633: Willa Cather to Margaret Badollet Shotwell, October 20, 1922

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NUMBER FIVE BANK STREET³ New York City², October 20, 1922. My dear Mrs. Shotwell¹:

Thank you so much for your friendly word and Newbranch’s⁴ splendid editorial⁵. It delighted me.

I am glad you know our near neighbor, Bernard McNeny⁶, of Red Cloud⁷, and hope to have the pleasure of knowing him myself one day.

Very sincerely yours, Willa Cather

Information about this letter:

Source File:: cat.let0633.xml
Letter identifier: 0633
Contents: Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
Person to whom letter was written: Margaret Badollet Shotwell¹
Date letter was written: October 20, 1922
Place letter was written: New York, New York, United States²
Location of original letter: WCPM Collection, National Willa Cather Center, Red Cloud, NE

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

1139

Shotwell, Margaret Badollet (c.1885-after 1944). American poet and socialite. Born in Nebraska, Margaret Badollet married the Republican politician Franklin Shotwell. Margaret Shotwell was active in Omaha literary circles, initiating “Nebraska Writers Week” and writing the weekly column "Bibliophile by Badollet" in the Omaha Daily News. Shotwell’s controversial poem “Will Willa?,” which criticized Léon Bakst’s portrait of Willa Cather commissioned for the Omaha Public Library, was published in the Omaha Daily News and reprinted in Publishers Weekly.

0214

Newbranch, Harvey E. (1875-1959). Newspaper editor; Cather’s university classmate. Harvey Newbranch was born in Iowa; his family moved to Nebraska and in 1892 he entered the University of Nebraska, following Cather as editor of the Hesperian student newspaper and graduating in 1896. That same year he married classmate Evalena Rolofson; they had four daughters. In 1898 Newbranch began working for the Omaha, NE, World-Herald as its Lincoln correspondent. Subsequently he worked in Omaha as reporter, editorial writer, and finally editor beginning in 1910. In 1920 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorial condemning the mob that lynched an African American man. Cather kept in occasional touch with the Newbranches, and in 1929 her letter to Newbranch as editor about the demise of small town opera houses was published in the World-Herald’s diamond jubilee edition.

0075

McNeny, Bernard (1871-1939). Red Cloud lawyer. Bernard McNeny was born in Ft. McHenry, NY. He came to Red Cloud, NE, in 1889 to visit his elder brother James McNeny, a lawyer, and was himself admitted to the bar in 1891, becoming very successful. He was part of the young social set of Red Cloud when Cather was growing up there. He married Helen Sherman in 1907, and they had one daughter, Helen, in 1908. In 1914 the McNenys moved into a house across the street from the second Charles Cather home. Bernard McNeny handled some business and legal matters for Willa Cather.

Place Annotations

New York, New York, United States

Red Cloud, Nebraska, United States

Work Annotations

"Every Man a King," Omaha World-Herald (November 1, 1921) by Harvey E. Newbranch