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 |
May I thank you for the pleasure your generous, friendly letter gives me? I have had many letters from people who knew that country in early days, and I am more than glad that my presentation of it seems true to them. I find more satisfaction in letters like yours, from a man who knew the country and people of my story, than in the appreciative things the reviewers have said of it.
I spent my childhood in Nebraska4, and my grandfather5 was there long before my day. I am very happy to have been able to recall those far-away times to you, and I thank you heartily for your thoughtfulness in letting me know that I have done so.
Cordially yours Willa Sibert Cather Willa S CatherAuthor of
My Antonia TC
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0275.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0275
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Mr. Phelps 1
- Date letter was written
- February 11 [1914 or 1919]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
This letter seems to have been written in response to praise for either O Pioneers!, published in June 1913, or My Ántonia, published in September 1918. She most likely responded to Phelps in the February after one of these books was published.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, 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
5 Bank Street (New York City): The apartment Cather shared with Edith Lewis beginning in 1912, located in Greenwich Village in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Subway construction forced Cather and Lewis to relocate in 1927.
Person Annotations
Phelps, Mr. American reader. Phelps, who had been in Nebraska in the late nineteenth century, wrote Cather about either O Pioneers! or My Ántonia. However, no further information is known about him.
Cather, William (1823-1887). Farmer; Cather’s grandfather.
Born in Back Creek Valley, VA, a son of James and Ann Howard Cather,
William Cather farmed and also raised sheep. He married Emily Anne Caroline
Smith in 1846, and they had two sons and three daughters who survived to
adulthood. In 1851, William Cather built a brick house he named “Willow
Shade,” where Willa Cather lived in her early childhood. William Cather and
his wife sided with the Union during the Civil War; after the war, William
Cather served his community as sheriff and funded schools. After visiting
his eldest son, George P. Cather, in Nebraska in 1874, he decided to settle
there, eventually bringing their surviving children, including Charles F.
Cather, Willa’s father. Later William turned his Webster County farmland
over to Charles, and he and his wife moved to Red Cloud, NE, taking their
orphaned grandchildren Kyd Clutter and Retta Ayre, with them. Cather
portrayed her paternal grandparents as Grandfather and Grandmother Burden in
My Ántonia (1918).
Place Annotations
