Guide to Reading Letter Transcriptions
Some of these features are only visible when "plain text" is off.
| 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 sending you today a bunch of the most important notices of our book4. You need not return them to me, but you must let
Irene5 see them. The one6 in the “Dial”7 is the
one I like best, because it was written by the most intelligent man8. He died a few weeks after this article was
printed, of influenza, and his death is a great loss to American letters. I enclose
a notice about him along with the reviews. I have had more than a hundred
letters about the book, from all sorts of people, and answering them has really been
a serious drain on my time. Mr. Edwin W.
Winter9, for many years president of the Missouri Pacific railroad,
after writing me two letters, came to see see me to
tell me how much he liked the book, and now he often drops in on Friday and seems
like an old friend. From first to last this book has been a great pleasure and
satisfaction to me, but nothing pleases me quite so much as that you and father10 like it so well.
Did you get a copy of Durer’s11 rabbit picture12 I sent you some weeks ago? at Christmas time?
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0452.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0452
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Carrie Miner Sherwood1
- Date letter was written
- February 11 [1919]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
Cather is sending Carrie Miner Sherwood reviews of My Ántonia (1918), indicating that this letter was written in 1919.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- WCPM Collection, National Willa Cather Center, Red Cloud, NE
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.
Albrecht Dürer's Young Hare (1502).
Person Annotations
Sherwood, Carrie Belle Miner (1869-1972) Civic leader;
Cather's friend. Born in Waukon, IA, to James L. Miner and Julia
Erickson Miner, Carrie Miner was the eldest of their children. The family
moved to Red Cloud, NE, in 1878, where the Miner Brothers store became the
largest in town. Cather remembered meeting Carrie there. In 1884, Carrie,
her mother, and siblings were confirmed in the Catholic church. In 1888, she
studied music at St. Mary’s Academy at Notre Dame, IN. She married bank
clerk Walter Sherwood in late 1889; they had two sons. The Sherwoods
travelled often in the West, and visited Europe in 1930. They built a new
house at 3rd and Seward streets in Red Cloud in 1908; Cather sometimes sent
materials for Carrie to keep in its spacious attics. Carrie Miner Sherwood
led local Red Cross work during the two World Wars, served on the Red Cloud
school board and park commission, and was active in the League of Women
Voters and in the Ladies Guild of Grace Episcopal Church. Cather
corresponded with Carrie Miner Sherwood throughout her life and dedicated
My Ántonia to Carrie, model for Frances Harling
in the novel, and her sister Irene. Carrie was one of Mildred Bennett’s
chief sources for The World of Willa Cather (1951),
and was instrumental in setting up what is now the Willa Cather Foundation
in Red Cloud.
Weisz, Irene Miner (1881-1971). Musician; Cather’s lifelong
friend. Born in Red Cloud, NE, the youngest child of James L.
Miner and Julia Erickson Miner, Irene Miner was educated in Red Cloud,
graduating in 1898 and played with the Cather children as part of the play
town of Sandy Point and in amateur theatricals. She studied piano with local
teachers, such as Mrs. P.E.B. Sill, then went to the Chicago College of
Music from 1899 to 1901. She met clerk Charles Weisz, later president of the
A.F. Shaw insurance company, there; they married in late 1915, settling in
Chicago. She visited Red Cloud frequently, but also travelled in the
American West and then to Europe in 1921 and around the world in 1934.
Cather corresponded with Irene Miner Weisz for many years and sometimes
stayed with her in Chicago when travelling to and from the West. My Ántonia is dedicated to Irene, model for Nina
Harling in the novel, and to her sister Carrie Miner Sherwood.
Bourne, Randolph (1886-1918). American critic and essayist.
Bourne became associated with the newly founded the New Republic magazine in 1914. Cather admired his
criticism and especially the resistance to melting-pot Americanization of
immigrants expressed in his essay "Trans-National America," published in Atlantic Monthly in 1916. She was also pleased with
Bourne's anonymous review of The Song of the Lark
(1915) and his review of My Ántonia (1918), and she
regretted his early death in the flu pandemic. It is not clear whether
Cather ever met Bourne, but he was a close friend and correspondent of her
friend Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.
Winter, Edwin W. (1845-1930). American railroad executive. After serving in an Illinois regiment during the Civil War, Winter joined the Union Pacific Railway Company in 1867 and worked for the railroads in varying capacities for the rest of his professional life. He was president of the Northern Pacific Railway Company from 1896 to 1897 and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company from 1903 to 1911. Winter wrote a complimentary letter to Cather after reading My Ántonia (1918) and visited her in 1919 to tell her how much he enjoyed the book. Willa Cather wrote to her brother Roscoe that she would “rather have the admiration of one man like” Winter “than sell a thousand books” (#2085).
Cather, Charles Fectigue (1848-1928). Cather’s father.
Charles Fectigue (possibly Fectique) Cather was born in the Back
Creek Valley of Virginia, north of Winchester. His family were sheep raisers
who were largely, but not entirely, Union supporters during the Civil War.
He married Mary Virginia Seibert Boak, daughter of Confederate supporters,
in 1872. In 1883 he and his family followed his parents, William and
Caroline Cather, and brother George to Webster County in Nebraska, where
various cousins and uncles had also settled. Initially he ran a ranch in the
county but soon moved his family into the town of Red Cloud, where he had an
insurance and real estate business. Four of his children, Willa, Roscoe,
Charles, and Jessica, were born in Virginia, while three, James, Elsie, and
John, were born in Nebraska. Cather’s relationship with her father was very
warm: she made regular visits to her parents in Red Cloud and especially
enjoyed her father’s letters expressing appreciation of her novels. A week
after she concluded a visit to her ailing father in Red Cloud, he died of
heart disease. He served as the prototype for Hillary Templeton in “Old Mrs.
Harris” (1932).
Dürer, Albrecht (1471-1528). German artist. Born in the Free
City of Nuremberg, the young Albrecht Dürer apprenticed to a painter who
produced woodcut illustrations for books. As a young man Dürer helped make
printmaking into an independent art form. He traveled to Italy twice,
bringing classical motifs to the Northern Renaissance in many paintings and
engravings. His travels in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Germany are
recorded in detailed notebooks and sketches. Dürer was official court artist
to two Holy Roman Emperors. Willa Cather purchased a reproduction of one of
his paintings for her friend Carrie Miner Sherwood.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
My Ántonia (1918) by Willa Cather
"Morals and Art from the West," Dial (December 14, 1918) by Randolph Bourne
Dial
