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 |
The Heeren Building
Penn Ave. and Eighth St.
AXTELL & ORR, Publishers. Pittsburgh, Pa. June 21/97 My Dear Friends1;
I just could not get over Saturday evening, and as I go Wednesday am afraid I will not see you again. Your library cards I have left at the library. The Brownies4 will gladden Jack's5 heart and I thank Erna6 for him and hope she will not have grown quite beyond all recognition when I get back. I may drop you a line from the wild west7, at any rate will let you know as soon as I return. The pleasantest hours I have spent in Pittsburgh2 have been passed in your sitting room and I carry away happy memories of you all. And now Good bye for a month.
Yours as Ever Willa Cather.Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0038.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0038
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- George Seibel and Helen Hiller Seibel1
- Date letter was written
- June 21, 1897
- Place letter was written
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States2
- Location of original letter
- WCPM Collection, National Willa Cather Center, Red Cloud, NE
Individual Annotations
Cather worked as the unofficial managing editor of the Home Monthly magazine, owned by Axtell, Orr, and Company, from July 1896 until June 1897. The Home Monthly office was on Shady Avenue on the east end of Pittsburgh.
The "Brownies" were a series of cartoon characters developed by Palmer Cox and immensely popular with children in the 1880s through the early 1890s. A group of small, mischevious men based on Scottish folklore, the Brownies first appeared in the February 1883 issue of St. Nicholas. These characters were the first cartoons to be used in mass merchandizing, as their likeness was reproduced into 7-inch toys, blocks, puzzles, bowling pins, rubber stamps, etc.
Person Annotations
Seibel, George (1873-1958). American literary and drama critic.
Cather met Seibel and his wife Helen while working as editor of the
Home Monthly in Pittsburgh in 1896 and 1897. They
regularly studied French and German together, Cather read her work in
progress to him, and George reviewed April Twilights
(1903) in the Pittsburgh Gazette.
Seibel, Helen Hiller (1873-1971). Cather’s Pittsburgh friend.
Born in Pennsylvania to German immigrant parents, Helen Hiller
married George Seibel on 6 September 1894. Their one child, Erna, was born
in 1897. Cather met the couple through George Seibel’s work for the Home Monthly, which Cather was editing. Soon the
three were meeting frequently at the Seibel home, studying and translating
French and German literature. Cather read her own poetry and short stories
to them as well. The Seibel house at 114 S. 17th Street on Pittsburgh’s
South Side served as the model for the home of Alfred Engelhardt and his
uncle in “Double Birthday” (1925).
Cather, John (1892-1959) (“Jack”). Cather’s brother.
Born and raised in Red Cloud, NE, Jack was the seventh child and
fourth son of Charles and Virginia Cather. He was nearly two decades younger
than Willa Cather, and she was a doting older sister when he was a small
boy. Because she missed him after her 1896 move to Pittsburgh, PA, she wrote
several poems about him and the story “Jack-a-Boy” (1901). After graduating
from Red Cloud High School in 1912, Jack studied for two years at University
of Nebraska in Lincoln. With Willa Cather’s encouragement, in 1914 he
enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh to study
engineering. Willa Cather was then living in New York City but traveled to
Pittsburgh to help him settle in and enjoyed visiting him and supported his
decision to change his major to theater. It is not clear whether he
graduated from Carnegie Tech but the British government trained him as a
chemist so he could inspect munitions factories. While working in Smethport,
PA, he met Irma Wells, and they married in 1918. They had two children,
Catherine and Ella Faye. After World War I, he worked as a chemical engineer
in the oil industry in Cincinnati, OH, Casper, WY, and Bradford, PA. In 1936
he moved to Whittier, CA, and became a business partner with his brothers
Douglass and James in an oil production company. He died in Long Beach, CA.
Willa Cather mentions him frequently in letters, but she seems to have had
little contact with him and his family in later years, and no letters from
her to him have surfaced.
Yorke, Erna Seibel (1897-after 1971). Daughter of Cather’s friends, George and Helen Seibel. Erna Seibel was born in Pittsburgh, PA; Willa Cather was a frequent visitor at her family’s home in her early childhood. She attended Carnegie Tech, studying art. Around 1927 she married Cecil B. Yorke, a writer. They had a son, Duane, and lived in New York in the 1930s, later moving to Santa Cruz, CA. She donated the letters Cather had written to her parents to the Cather Foundation.
Place Annotations
