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 |
Here are the postcards3. I like the one printed in brown much better than the others.
Please let me know if the latter chapters of the book4 satisfy you. I can't make the changes in Dr. Archie5 until I get a short story6 for McClure's7 and my infant brother8 off my hands. The story has to be delivered sometime the first week in May.
Hastily W. S. C.Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0299.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0299
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Ferris Greenslet1
- Date letter was written
- April 22 [1915]
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Houghton Mifflin Company correspondence and records, 1832-1944 (MSAm1925), Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA
Individual Annotations
On 23 April 1915, Greenslet thanked her for sending postcard reproductions of Jules Breton's painting "The Song of the Lark" (1884), which ultimately appeared on the dust jacket of Cather's novel.
See #0296
Person Annotations
Greenslet, Ferris (1875-1959). American editor and writer.
Born in Glens Falls, NY, Ferris Greenslet earned a BA (1897) from
Wesleyan University and a PhD (1900) from Columbia University. He served as
associate editor at the Atlantic Monthly from 1902 to
1907, and married Ella Stoothoff Hulst in 1903; they had two children,
Marguerite (born 1904) and George (born 1906). As an author he specialized
in biography. He became literary editor at Houghton Mifflin, the Boston
publisher of the Atlantic, c. 1908 and was socially
and professionally acquainted with Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett,
who may have introduced him to Cather. He evidently solicited Cather to
submit Alexander’s Bridge (1912), her first published
novel, to Houghton Mifflin. In 1910, when Greenslet became editor in chief
of the trade department, Roger Scaife divided his shares as a director of
the company with him, and the two presented themselves to authors as
partners, with Scaife handling book advertising and format and Greenslet
negotiating contracts and supervising editing; when Greenslet was absent
from the office, Scaife handled correspondence with Cather. Greenslet became
a director of Houghton Mifflin in 1919 and manager of the trade department
in 1933. Cather left Houghton Mifflin as a publisher for Alfred A. Knopf,
Inc., because she became dissatisfied with the production and advertising of
her books. However, she remained on cordial terms with Greenslet and
undertook several projects for him after her departure. Her extant letters
to him constitute one of the largest groups to a single correspondent.
Cather, John (1892-1959) (“Jack”). Cather’s brother.
Born and raised in Red Cloud, NE, Jack was the seventh child and
fourth son of Charles and Virginia Cather. He was nearly two decades younger
than Willa Cather, and she was a doting older sister when he was a small
boy. Because she missed him after her 1896 move to Pittsburgh, PA, she wrote
several poems about him and the story “Jack-a-Boy” (1901). After graduating
from Red Cloud High School in 1912, Jack studied for two years at University
of Nebraska in Lincoln. With Willa Cather’s encouragement, in 1914 he
enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh to study
engineering. Willa Cather was then living in New York City but traveled to
Pittsburgh to help him settle in and enjoyed visiting him and supported his
decision to change his major to theater. It is not clear whether he
graduated from Carnegie Tech but the British government trained him as a
chemist so he could inspect munitions factories. While working in Smethport,
PA, he met Irma Wells, and they married in 1918. They had two children,
Catherine and Ella Faye. After World War I, he worked as a chemical engineer
in the oil industry in Cincinnati, OH, Casper, WY, and Bradford, PA. In 1936
he moved to Whittier, CA, and became a business partner with his brothers
Douglass and James in an oil production company. He died in Long Beach, CA.
Willa Cather mentions him frequently in letters, but she seems to have had
little contact with him and his family in later years, and no letters from
her to him have surfaced.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
The Song of the Lark (1915) by Willa Cather
"Consequences," McClure's Magazine (November 1915) by Willa Cather
McClure's Magazine
