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 |
Pittsburg Leader5 September 29 1900 My Dear Mr. Jones1:
Thank you heartily for your letter. The “Library”6 position is a very good one, but I have only accepted
it temporarily. My family want to move to Lincoln4 and mother7
is too ill to attend to loading the cook stove in the wagon, and so I must
do it. I expect to be in Lincoln about November First, to stay for the
winter, and I shall not be too haughty to do some work on the Journal3 if you
can arrange it for me. I am not a good
loafer any more—I’ve lost the art of it, and if I wrote verse and storys all the time I’d soon look like Herbert
Bates8! I can do that sort of
thing three or four days out of every week, but not more; my heads gets
muddy. It has been a great old year though, the happiest of my life. I have
a lot of new things coming out this fall, both in prose and verse, and the word
world is a good place to live in.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0062.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0062
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Will Owen Jones 1
- Date letter was written
- September 29, 1900
- Place letter was written
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Willa Cather Papers, 1899-1949, in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library (#6494-6494-i), University of Virginia, Special Collections, Charlottesville, VA
Person Annotations
Jones, Will Owen (1862-1928). Newspaper editor. Will Owen Jones was born in Wisconsin and came to Nebraska by 1880. He worked for the Nebraska State Journal while attending the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, graduating in 1886. That year he became city editor of the paper, then associate editor in 1889 (the year he married pianist Edith M. Doolittle), and then managing editor in 1892. He was close to Charles and Mariel Gere, the owners of the Nebraska State Journal, and the Jones’s only child, Mariel Jones, was named for Mrs. Gere. Cather took his journalism course at the university in 1893 and wrote to him often early in her career, although he could be severe in his criticism of some of her work.
Cather, Mary Virginia Boak (1850-1931) (“Virginia” or
“Jenny”). Cather’s mother. Born in the Virginia to William Lee
Boak and Rachel Seibert Boak, Virginia was educated in Baltimore, MD, and
was a schoolteacher until her marriage to Charles Fectigue Cather in 1872.
Her husband’s family were primarily Union supporters during the Civil War
while her family supported the Confederacy (three brothers served in the
Confederate Army although their mother opposed slavery). After her marriage
she tried to help unite the divided family. Four of her children, Willa,
Roscoe, Charles Douglas, and Jessica Virginia, were born in Virginia, while
three, James Donald, Elsie Margaret, and John Esten, were born in Nebraska
after the family moved there in 1883. Despite occasional differences, Cather
remained in affectionate contact with her mother, who remained in Red Cloud,
NE, where the family settled in 1884. After her husband’s death in 1928
Virginia Cather suffered a stroke while visiting her children and their
families in California. She spent nearly three years in a sanitarium in
Pasadena, CA, unable to speak. Willa Cather visited her there several times
but was unable to travel quickly enough from Grand Manan to Red Cloud for
her funeral and interment after she died in Pasadena in 1931. Virginia
Cather was the prototype for Victoria Templeton in “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932),
which Willa Cather completed shortly before her mother’s death.
Bates, Herbert (1868-1929). American educator and writer. Born in Massachusetts, Bates received his BA from Harvard (1890), where he contributed to campus publications. In 1891 he came to the University of Nebraska as an instructor in rhetoric; Cather was one of his students, and he inspired the character of Gaston Cleric in My Ántonia (1918). When he left Nebraska in 1896 she applied unsuccessfully for his position. He published a volume of poetry, Songs of Exile (1896), before joining the faculty of the Manual Training High School in Brooklyn, NY, in 1897. He became active in the National Council of Teachers of English, wrote A History of English Literature (1918), and edited Modern Lyric Poetry (1929), and various classics. Cather owned a copy of his edition of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1895) and kept in occasional touch with him until his death.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Nebraska State Journal
Pittsburgh Leader
Library
