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 |
I am so sorry to know that you have had bad tidings and have lost a friend. You were good to remember me at all under such circumstances. I had counted upon getting in touch with you last week, but unexpected things kept turning up, (among them Mr. McClure4) and everything is difficult to sick people. I am leaving for Pittsburgh5 tomorrow night, but I shall be back the first of September, and then I shall see you just as soon as you will let me.
Elsie Sergeant6 literally saved my reason7 in Boston8. I'll never forget all the things she did for me.
Faithfully Willa Sibert CatherInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0215.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0215
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Pauline Goldmark1
- Date letter was written
- [March 5, 1912]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
In #0217, written on 13 March 1912, Cather explained that she arrived in Pittsburgh the morning of the previous Friday, which was 8 March 1912. 5 March 1912 is the Tuesday before this date.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Literary and Historical Manuscripts (MA 1603 (1)), Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY
Individual Annotations
60 Washington Square (New York City): The address of Cather's first rented room in New York from 1906 to 1908. Located on the south side of Washington Square Park, Edith Lewis lived in the same building and was there when Cather visited her in 1904 and 1905. The building was in a cluster later called "Genius Row" due to the large number of writers and artists that lived there. Cather briefly returned to the address in the spring of 1912 before moving to 5 Bank Street later that fall.
See #0213.
Person Annotations
Goldmark, Pauline Dorothea (1874-1962). American social reformer.
Born in Brooklyn, NY, to Polish and Czech Jewish parents whose
families fled Austria after the Revolution of 1848, Goldmark earned a BA in
biology from Bryn Mawr College in 1896. While studying two additional years
at Barnard College she volunteered with the New York State chapter of the
National Consumers League (NCL), and sociological research and reform became
her life’s work, in which she also enlisted her sister Josephine. Cather met
Pauline Goldmark and her sisters Josephine and Alice (who married Louis D.
Brandeis and lived in Boston) when she was on assignment in Boston for McClure’s Magazine in 1907-1908. Pauline Goldmark and
Cather became lifelong friends, although extant correspondence is sparse. In
1910, Pauline sent Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant to Cather with a proposed
article based on NCL research, and she was also instrumental in placing a
series of widely-noticed McClure’s articles by Susan
Ainslie Clark on working girls and women based in New York City similarly
based on NCL research. In later years she and her sister Josephine lived
together in Hartsdale, NY, where Pauline died.
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.
Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley (1881-1965). American journalist and
author. Born and raised in Winchester, MA, a suburb of Boston,
Elizabeth Sergeant graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1903. In 1910,
Pauline Goldmark sent her to Cather at McClure’s
Magazine with a proposed article, published as “Toilers of the
Tenements,” and Cather and Sergeant became lifelong friends. In 1914
Sergeant became one of the original contributors to the New Republic. While on assignment in France in 1917 she was
injured by a land mine; her injury and recuperation were the subject of Shadow-Shapes: Journal of a Wounded Woman (1920). She
moved to New Mexico in 1920 and became involved with the Taos artists colony
and advocated for Native American rights, but her work frequently took her
back to New York City. She included Cather in her collection of portraits of
prominent Americans, Fire under the Andes (1927).
Sergeant studied with Carl Jung and Toni Woolf in Zurich, Switzerland, from
1929 to 1931. When she returned to the U.S. she sold her house in New Mexico
and settled in New York City, writing many magazine articles about authors
and psychological topics. She later moved to Rockland County, NY. Cather’s
letters to Sergeant comment frequently on both her own and Sergeant’s
writing and testify to a strong and lively friendship maintained despite
Sergeant's being a committed reformer and far to the left of Cather
politically and culturally. Sergeant’s Willa Cather: A
Memoir (1953) includes extensive paraphrases of Cather’s letters to
her.
Place Annotations
