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 is the article5 from the Nation6. If you can reprint7 it8 in the Journal9 you will please me very much and I have a hope that it would interest a good many people in Nebraska10.
Faithfully yours Willa S. Cather October 29, 1915I have just written Houghton Mifflin asking them to place in the Journal the ad they had in the New York11 and Boston12 papers. I hope they will do so.
Mr. Will Owen Jones1 Nebraska State Journal Lincoln3 Nebraska PITTSBURGH, PA.2 OCT 29 1915 TRIP-11 PersonalInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0328.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0328
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Will Owen Jones 1
- Date letter was written
- October 29, 1915
- 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.
Boynton begins his commentary on The Song of the Lark by hypothesizing that protagonist Thea Kronborg's "three weeks relation with" Fred Ottenburg "will attract more attention from a certain class of readers than all the rest of the story." However, he characterizes the "episode" as realistic and "important, but not determining or even focal." Moving on from this, he writes, "Miss Cather has attempted that most dangerous of feats--to trace the genesis of genius."
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.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
"Varieties of Realism," Nation (October 1915) by H. W. Boynton
Nation
"Readers and Writers," Nebraska State Journal (November 28, 1915)
Nebraska State Journal
