Guide to Reading Letter Transcriptions
Some of these features are only visible when "plain text" is off.
| 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 |
I am going to rid myself of these detestable book that have lain around making me miserable long enough, speaking of the things which should have been and were not.
Please dont get hot and consider me impudent, for I cant read a word of them, and they are surely not things of beauty, so what do I want with them.
Just read them; when you are through you can do what you please with them. If they
are in your way you cant donate them to
university or submerge them in Lake Lincoln, only please let them be yours to donat or submerge.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0011.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0011
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Louise Pound 1
- Date letter was written
- August 6, 1892
- Place letter was written
- Red Cloud, Nebraska, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Louise Pound Papers (RL.00039), Duke University, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Durham, NC
Person Annotations
Pound, Louise (1872-1958). American folklorist and university
professor. Pound and Cather met when both were students at the
University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where Cather also knew Louise’s brother
Roscoe and sister Olivia. Cather was deeply infatuated with Louise, who was
both an outstanding student and an accomplished multi-sport athlete. Pound
visited Cather in Red Cloud, NE, several times, but she apparently did not
reciprocate Cather’s intense affection, and Cather’s lampoon of Roscoe Pound
in “Pastels in Prose” (1894) caused a rift between the two women. Pound
earned a BA from Nebraska in 1892, an MA in 1895, and a PhD from the
University of Heidelberg in 1900. She was a professor in the English
department at the University of Nebraska, where she taught Cather's sister
Elsie, until 1945. From 1954-55 she served as the first female president of
the Modern Language Association.
Place Annotations
