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 |
44-60 East Twenty-Third Street,
New York.2 Dear Mr. Dwight1;
The purpose of this note is threefold; 1st to tell you
how bitterly I envy your strength of mind in breaking away; 2nd to wish you all the luck in the world, and third to repudiate a
suggestion of your suspicious nature to the effect that I wished to see your yarns
as a "puller-in" for the McClure4 shop. How
very dull of you to misunderstand me so. Do I seem like Bynner5? It is just in
my very humble role of an occasional fellow worker at a very thankless and stubborn
craft, that I asked you to let me see what you do. Unless you are of a haughty
spirit you ought not to object, especially when I promise to let them
the manuscripts take their natural course after I have
explored them.
Well, I wish you a successful crusade, and I hope with all my heart that you'll bring
back all manner of spices and silks and perfumes, a
whole caravan [illegible] load, and
that I may come to see you standing in the marketplace and spreading your spoils
about you in gorgeousness. I do very much want to see you do it.
Good hunting to you, and all the happiness of good work.
Faithfully Willa Sibert Cather Friday afternoonInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0117.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0117
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Harrison G. Dwight 1
- Date letter was written
- [November 2, 1906]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The conjectured date is derived from the penciled date on the letter in a hand not Cather's, which is plausible in the context of Cather's work on McClure's Magazine in 1906 and her other correspondence with Dwight.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Harrison Griswold Dwight (AC 1898) Papers, 1890-1959 (MA.00012), Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, Amherst, MA
Person Annotations
Dwight, Harrison Griswold (1875-1959). American writer and diplomat.
Dwight was born in Constantinople, Turkey, to a missionary family.
His early education was abroad, but he graduated from Amherst College in
Amherst, MA, in 1898. He joined the consular service and later worked as a
translator during World War I. Cather apparently met him in 1906 in
connection with editorial work at McClure’s Magazine.
Cather and Dwight occasionally met socially; he apparently also knew
Cather’s Pittsburgh friends, Mary and May Willard. Her letters often report
her reactions to his work, including Stamboul Nights
(1916), which drew on his experience in the Middle East.
McClure, Samuel Sidney (1857-1949) (“S.S.”). Irish-born
American publisher. McClure immigrated to the U.S. at age nine,
living with his family in Indiana. Despite poverty and the limited education
he had received in Ireland, he graduated from high school and then Knox
College in Illinois. He then moved to Boston, MA, where from 1882 to 1884 he
edited the Wheelman, a bicycling magazine. Despite
opposition from her parents, he married his Knox College classmate Harriet
Hurd in 1883. The couple had four biological children (Eleanor, Bess, Mary,
and Robert), and adopted one (Enrico). In 1884, S.S. started McClure’s
Syndicate, which placed fiction in newspapers across the country. In 1893
with his college classmate John Sanborn Phillips he started McClure's Magazine, which was best-known for the
"muckraking" exposés by writers such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens,
but which also published literature. After his cousin H.H. McClure, who
worked for the McClure Syndicate, brought Cather to S.S. McClure’s
attention, McClure, Phillips & Co. brought out Cather’s first book of
fiction, The Troll Garden (1905). When most of the
editorial staff, including Steffens and Tarbell, resigned from McClure’s in 1906, he hired Cather as an editor; she
later became managing editor. After she left her position at McClure’s in 1912 and when S. S. McClure had lost
control of the magazine still bearing his name, Cather ghost wrote his
autobiography (McClure’s serial 1913-1914, book
publication 1914). McClure made repeated—and ultimately
failed—attempts to reestablish himself in journalism and magazine
publishing, often trying to enlist Cather in these enterprises. She almost
went with him to Europe in 1915 to report on the war for the Evening Mail, and she remained personally loyal to
her mercurial and often-irresponsible former employer. He served as the
prototype for Marcus O’Mally, editor of the Outcry,
in her story “Ardessa” (1918), and it has been suggested that Cather modeled
the courtship and marriage between Myra and Oswald Henshaw in My Mortal Enemy (1926) on that of the McClures.
Bynner, Witter (1881-1968). American poet and playwright. Born in Brooklyn, NY, Bynner spent most of his childhood in Brookline, MA, and graduated from Harvard University in 1902. The same year he joined the editorial staff of McClure’s Magazine in New York City, first as an office boy and then as assistant to literary editor Viola Roseboro’. He also worked on matters pertaining to the associated book publishing firm McClure, Phillips, and Co. Bynner sent copies of Cather’s The Troll Garden (1905), published by McClure, Phillips, and Co., to Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Margaret Deland; he conveyed back to Cather James’ dismissive response about American women authors. Bynner left McClure’s in 1906 to concentrate on his poetry and sent Cather a copy of his first book of poems, An Ode to Harvard and Other Poems (1907), to which she responded graciously, but by 1915 she used his name as a shorthand for the worst of modern poetry. In 1916 with his fellow poet Arthur Davison Ficke, Bynner undertook to satirize the Imagist school of poetry by concocting a fake school of poetry, the Spectrics. Bynner assumed the persona Emanual Morgan while Ficke became Anne Knish; they maintained the façade until the 1920s. As a result of a trip to Asia in 1917 with Ficke, Bynner became interested in Chinese T’Ang Dynasty poetry and collaboratively produced a volume of translations with Kiang Kan-hum, The Jade Mountain (1929). He also continued to be a prolific author of original verse. He and Spud Johnson, his secretary and lover, traveled in the American Southwest and Mexico with D. H. and Frieda Lawrence in 1923. Bynner subsequently visited Santa Fe, NM, frequently and bought a house there in 1940. Bynner published a memoir of D.H. Lawrence, Journeys with Genius (1951). After Cather’s death, he was critical of Cather in print, and in letters he spread misinformation about her early career. From 1930, admirer Robert Hunt was his lover and personal assistant. He died in Santa Fe soon after the sudden death of Hunt.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
McClure's Magazine
