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 |
Did you ever get my letter telling you the papers4 I wanted, the ones containing the letters from Avignon5, Huyeres6, and Lavandou7? Can you find them for me.
I am to have a volume of verse8 published this spring—March or April. Badger9, of Boston10 is the publisher. He is putting out a lot of new verse by Clinton Scollard11, Edith M. Thomas12, Harriet Prescott Spofford13 etc. He has made me most liberal terms and if the book sells well I shall make a neat little sum from it. He wants to send circulars to a number of people who know me, and I want to ask you if you can lend me a Lincoln14 directory for a few days? I shall need it next week, and will express it back to you shortly. If you cant send a directory a telephone book would help me out. I shall have a review copy of the book sent you as early as possible.
Best wishes for the new year to you all.
Faithfully Willa S. Cather. January Second.Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0079.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0079
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Will Owen Jones 1
- Date letter was written
- January 2 [1903]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The year of this letter is established by Cather's reference to the imminent publication of April Twilights (1903).
- 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
Individual Annotations
1180 Murray Hill Avenue (Pittsburgh, PA): Located in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA, now part of the Murray Hill Avenue Historic District, 1180 Murray Hill was the home of Judge Samuel A. McClung and his family. Cather lived there at Isabelle McClung’s invitation from 1901 to 1906. She returned there to visit multiple times until 1915, often writing during these visits.
On her 1902 trip to Europe, Cather had written articles about her travels for the Nebraska State Journal.
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.
Badger, Richard G. (1878-1937). American publisher. Born in Massachusetts, Badger established his printing house before he was twenty; one of the first books he published was Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Children of the Night (1897). Many of the books from his press were subsidized by the authors, including Cather’s first book, April Twilights (1903); in 1908 she bought the unsold copies of it. In addition to poetry, Badger also published avant-garde plays and fiction in the 1910s and books on abnormal psychology.
Scollard, Clinton (1860-1932). American poet. Born in Clinton, NY, Clinton Scollard graduated from Hamilton College in 1881, and studied at Harvard and at Cambridge University in England. He taught English at Hamilton College from 1888 to 1896, publishing his first seven volumes of lyric verse in that time, to be followed by a dozen more. He married Georgia Brown in 1890; they had one daughter, and divorced in 1924. Later that year Scollard married Jessie B. Rittenhouse, with whom he collaborated on two anthologies. Cather mentioned Scollard as one of the poets published by Richard Badger, who published Cather's volume of verse, April Twilights (1903).
Thomas, Edith Matilda (1854-1925). American poet. Born in Ohio, Edith M. Thomas briefly attended Oberlin College; after two years of teaching, she became a typesetter and began writing for local papers. Writer Helen Hunt Jackson encouraged her to send her poems to the leading periodicals of the East. Thomas’s first eleven volumes of verse, from 1885 to 1896, were published by such firms as Houghton Mifflin. She moved to New York in 1887. Cather mentioned Thomas as one of the poets published by Richard Badger, who issued six more volumes of her verse, from 1903 (the year Badger published Cather’s verse in April Twilights), to 1915. After Thomas’s death, Jessie B. Rittenhouse Scollard edited her Selected Poems (1926).
Spofford, Harriet Elizabeth Prescott (1835-1921). American author. Born in Maine, Harriet Prescott was educated at the Putnam School in Massachusetts, graduating in 1852. Her writing became the support of her invalid parents, so she wrote prolifically, mostly sensational fiction, but also poetry and nonfiction. A short story and a novel published in 1859 first made her reputation, augmented by her many later works, including Poems (1882). In 1865 she married Richard Spofford; they bought Deer Island, near Newburyport, MA, where Harriet Spofford died. Cather mentioned Spofford as one of the writers published by Richard Badger, who published Cather’s volume of verse, April Twilights (1903).
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
April Twilights (1903) by Willa Cather
