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 |
DENVER2 FG June 30 Dear Mr. Greenslet1:
Paul Reynolds4 can sell almost anything5, I imagine. He sold the awkward 15,000 word story6 I told you of, within a week after I sent it to him, for six hundred dollars, the story to be published in one number. I think I will let him manage the serial end of things for me after this.
I am on my way to Taos New Mexico7, and the Santa Clara pueblos and the Black Mesa. I'm a dog-in-the-manger, but I hope you wont let anyone else write a book about the South West8 for you. I'll simply have to do it in the end—it will do itself, indeed. Meanwhile I'm rather absorbed in another notion. You will probably hear about it later.
It's glorious to be in the West again.
Yours W. S. C.Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0359.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0359
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Ferris Greenslet1
- Date letter was written
- June 30 [1916]
- Place letter was written
- Denver, Colorado, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Houghton Mifflin Company correspondence and records, 1832-1944 (MSAm1925), Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA
Individual Annotations
Brown Palace Hotel (Denver, CO): Luxury hotel in downtown Denver, CO, that opened in 1892 under the ownership of Henry C. Brown. Cather stayed at the Brown Palace Hotel multiple times while in Denver, and writes about it in The Song of the Lark (1915) and A Lost Lady (1923).
On 10 June 1916, Greenslet wrote that Reynolds had written him asking for Cather's address because a magazine wanted to buy a story from her.
For Cather's planned travel book about the Southwest, see #0322.
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.
Reynolds, Paul Revere (1864-1944). American literary agent.
Born in Boston, MA, Reynolds earned a BA from Harvard University in
1887 and an M.A in 1891, studying under William James. In the wake of the
International Copyright Act of 1891, he became the U.S. agent for the
English publisher Cassell, later undertaking similar work for other British
publishers, He then began representing individual authors seeking to place
fiction with magazines and book publishers, taking a ten per cent
commission. Reynolds placed fiction in McClure’s
Magazine when Cather was an editor there. Cather first allowed him
to act as her own agent in 1916, placing “The Diamond Mine” in McClure’s. She was very pleased with the price he
secured for the story, expressing “the greatest satisfaction in his conduct
of affairs” (#0361). For the next decade, she allowed him to place short
stories and serialize her novels in magazines, although not consistently.
After the serialization of Death Comes for the
Archbishop (1927) in the Forum, she
consistently put off his queries about what she was writing, and he was
evidently surprised by the publication of “Neighbor Rosicky” in the Woman’s Home Companion (1930). Cather assured him
that she still wanted to work with him, but either she herself or staff at
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., arranged magazine publication of her remaining
fiction.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
"The Diamond Mine," McClure's Magazine (October 1916) by Willa Cather
