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 |
If you are going to use Mencken's3 remarks4 on "Antonia"5 upon the jacket6, why not use along with it Hugh Walpole's7 word8 in the last Bookman9? I write it out for you below.
Hastily W. S. C.ather" 'My Antonia', one of the very finest of all American novels10."
Hugh Walpole, the Bookman.Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0454.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0454
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Ferris Greenslet1
- Date letter was written
- [May 12, 1922]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
May 12, 1922, is the first Friday after May 9, 1922, the date of Ferris Greenslet's letter to which Cather is responding.
- 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
The following quotation was used on the dust jacket from 1922 forward: "No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful."
Cather reproduces only part of a sentence without its broader context. Walpole, responding to "Book Article No. 158" by H. L. Mencken in the January Smart Set, explains why the British press has failed to adequately notice American fiction: "Such a book as one of the very finest of all Amerian novels, My Ántonia, is simply not intelligible to the ordinary English reader."
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.
Mencken, Henry Louis (1880-1956) ("H. L."). American author, editor,
and journalist. Born in Baltimore, MD, into a German immigrant
family, Henry Louis Mencken worked in his father’s cigar factory for two
years after graduating high school. At age eighteen he became a cub reporter
for the Baltimore Herald, rising quickly through the
journalistic ranks while also publishing poetry and short stories in
national magazines. He became literary editor of the Smart
Set magazine in 1909, later becoming co-editor with George Jean
Nathan, while continuing to be a prolific and bold social and literary
critic. He and Nathan founded the American Mercury
magazine in 1923. Mencken reviewed many of Cather’s novels, and she began
corresponding with him about her work early in her career as a novelist. Her
stories “Her Boss” (1919) and “Coming, Eden Bower!” (1920) appeared in the
Smart Set, and from 1920 Cather and Mencken
shared Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., as a publisher (Mencken was a close personal
friend of both Alfred and Blanche Knopf). Mencken was one of the strongest
voices in favor of My Ántonia (1918), and Alfred
Knopf commissioned him to write an appreciation of Cather for The Borzoi 1920; however, Cather’s attempt to manage
his response to One of Ours (1922) by writing him in
advance of publication and soliciting a review failed—Mencken wrote one of
the most stingingly negative reviews of it. Mencken fell out of public favor
in the early 1930s but became popular again with the publication of his
fourth revision of The American Language in 1936,
which he continued to revise for the rest of his life. He spent the final
years of his life unable to write or speak as the result of a massive stroke
in 1948.
Walpole, Hugh (1884-1941). British writer. Born in New
Zealand, where his father was an Anglican priest, Hugh Walpole lived in New
York City from 1889 until 1893, when he was sent to boarding school in
England. He studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, from 1903 to
1906, then spent a few years teaching, reviewing, and writing. He published
his first, commercially unsuccessful novel in 1909, achieving commercial
success with his third novel in 1911. Henry James and Arnold Bennett took an
interest in him, and Walpole’s many works became very popular in the 1920s
and 1930s. He made four well-received and well-paid lecture tours in North
America; on the first, in 1919, Walpole praised Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) and Cather urged Houghton Mifflin to use
Walpole’s words in their advertising. Walpole was knighted in 1937; he died
at his home in the Lake District, the setting of many of his stories.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
"Reflections on Prose Fiction," Smart Set (May 1922) by H. L. Mencken
My Ántonia (1918) by Willa Cather
"An Open Letter to H.L. Mencken," Bookman (May 1922) by Hugh Walpole
Bookman
