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 |
As to the introductory chapter of “Antonia”6: such a device7 is very often employed by
Russian and French authors, when they wish their narrative to be colored by a
certain mood and certain personal feelings throughout. It is a device, and since it
is, the more frankly it is presented as such, the better. I wished here to present
the chief character through a man’s memory, because the most interesting things I
knew about theseveral women of whom she was made, were told me by men. I also wanted it written
in the first person, since it was so entirely a story of feel feeling and not of action. I felt competent to handle
a man’s narrative in the first person--a very hard thing for a woman to do-- mainly
because of the sever training I had in wwriting Mr.
McClure8's autobiography9, where I tried
so very hard to give his exact feelings
impressions in his most characteristic
language and with his nicest feeling. In that I succeeded so well that Mrs. McClure10 and Mr.
Phillips11, his partner and schoolmate, wrote me that it seemed to them
a perfectly convincing presentation of him as a boy and young man, and that the
sentences themselves had the abruptness ad and
suddenness characteristic of him. From my success in that peic piece
of work, I believed that I could interpret the youth of anoh another man, of a different sort, whom I also knew
very well.
The method employed in this story is, in itself, dangerous,— and usually
fakey,; but it was the only one to convey the shades of feeling I wished to convey, and my work on that
autobiography gave me the courage to try it. At first I found it awfully hampering
to try to be Mr. McClure all the time, but in the end it got to have a kind of
fascination to work within the limits and color of that personality I knew so well.
Ever since I have had had a sort of nagging
wish to try the experiment again. In this case the introduction had to state the
facts that the narrator of the story is a man of worldly experience,-for only those
who know the world can see the pasi
parish as it is--, that he has no children to plan for and is not particularly
fortunate in his domestic life. If he were, he would not dwell upon the years of his
first youth either so minutely or so sympathetically. This, I take it, answers your
question.
I am very sincerely glad you like the book. I suppose every serious writer w goes through the experience of disappointing and
estranging his early friends, and everyone developes as he mos must and can,
not as he would. The enclosed notice12
from a Chicago paper seems to give a pretty clear statement of what I have been
trying to do from the first. My aim has never changed, but in the early twenties one
simply does not know enough about life to make real people; one feels them, but one
has neither calm insight nor a practised ease of hand. As one grows older one cares
less about clever writing and more about a simple and faithful presentation. But to
reach this, one must have gone through the period where they one would die, so to speak, for the fine phrase; that
is essential to learning one’s business.
Yes, I want to stop in Lincoln4 again and see everybody.
Faithfully yours Willa Cather Mr. Will Owen Jones1 Nebraska State Journal3 Lincoln4 Nebraska NEW YORK N.Y.2 MAY 19 1919 5 PM Willa CatherInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0462.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0462
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, typewritten on recto of each leaf only. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Will Owen Jones 1
- Date letter was written
- [May 19, 1919]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The envelope associated with this letter is postmarked May 19, 1919, suggesting that Cather mistakenly dated the letter May 20.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, 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
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.
A woman (implicitly Cather) narrates the "Introduction" to the novel and introduces Jim Burden, who narrates the rest.
Cather was likely referring to the then-most-recent review in a Chicago paper, "Paper Dolls or People?," Chicago Daily News, April 12, 1919. The anonymous reviewer praised the "realness" of Cather's characters, finding this quality particularly important because most novels about the West featured "pasteboard" characters.
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.
McClure, Samuel Sidney (1857-1949) (“S.S.”). Irish-born
American publisher. McClure immigrated to the U.S. at age nine,
living with his family in Indiana. Despite poverty and the limited education
he had received in Ireland, he graduated from high school and then Knox
College in Illinois. He then moved to Boston, MA, where from 1882 to 1884 he
edited the Wheelman, a bicycling magazine. Despite
opposition from her parents, he married his Knox College classmate Harriet
Hurd in 1883. The couple had four biological children (Eleanor, Bess, Mary,
and Robert), and adopted one (Enrico). In 1884, S.S. started McClure’s
Syndicate, which placed fiction in newspapers across the country. In 1893
with his college classmate John Sanborn Phillips he started McClure's Magazine, which was best-known for the
"muckraking" exposés by writers such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens,
but which also published literature. After his cousin H.H. McClure, who
worked for the McClure Syndicate, brought Cather to S.S. McClure’s
attention, McClure, Phillips & Co. brought out Cather’s first book of
fiction, The Troll Garden (1905). When most of the
editorial staff, including Steffens and Tarbell, resigned from McClure’s in 1906, he hired Cather as an editor; she
later became managing editor. After she left her position at McClure’s in 1912 and when S. S. McClure had lost
control of the magazine still bearing his name, Cather ghost wrote his
autobiography (McClure’s serial 1913-1914, book
publication 1914). McClure made repeated—and ultimately
failed—attempts to reestablish himself in journalism and magazine
publishing, often trying to enlist Cather in these enterprises. She almost
went with him to Europe in 1915 to report on the war for the Evening Mail, and she remained personally loyal to
her mercurial and often-irresponsible former employer. He served as the
prototype for Marcus O’Mally, editor of the Outcry,
in her story “Ardessa” (1918), and it has been suggested that Cather modeled
the courtship and marriage between Myra and Oswald Henshaw in My Mortal Enemy (1926) on that of the McClures.
McClure, Harriet Sophia Hurd (1855-1929) (“Hattie”). Wife of S.S.
McClure. Born in Galesburg, IL, to Albert Hurd, a professor at
Knox College, and Eleanor Amelia Pennock, Harriet Hurd met fellow Knox
student S.S. McClure in 1876. Her parents opposed the romance between the
two and made her break off her engagement to him when she graduated in 1880.
In 1882, when she was teaching at Abbot Academy in Andover, MA, and McClure
was working in Boston, they rekindled their relationship and married in
Galesburg in 1883. They had four biological children (Eleanor, Bess, Mary,
and Robert), and one adopted child (Enrico). Cather first met Hattie McClure
in 1903, when S.S. called her to New York to discuss her fiction and she was
a guest in their home in Westchester County, NY. S.S. was notorious for both
financial irresponsibility and marital infidelity, but Cather maintained
cordial relations with both Hattie and S.S. even as others criticized both
of them. Nevertheless it has been suggested Cather modeled the relationship
between Myra and Oswald Henshaw in My Mortal Enemy
(1926) on that of the McClures.
Phillips, John Sanborn (1861-1949). American publisher. Born in Illinois, John S. Phillips attended Knox College in Galesburg, IL, where he met Samuel S. McClure. In 1887 McClure hired Phillips to manage the newspaper syndicate he had founded in 1884. In 1890, Phillips married Jennie Beale Peterson; the couple had five children. In 1893 McClure and Phillips founded McClure’s Magazine, of which Phillips was co-editor, and in 1900 they founded the publishing house of McClure, Phillips, which published Willa Cather’s short story collection The Troll Garden (1905). In 1906 Phillips split with McClure, and, Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens joined him in creating the American Magazine; their departure led McClure to hire Cather as an editor at McClure’s. In 1918 Phillips became editor of the Red Cross Magazine, the official organ of the Red Cross; Cather published two essays in the magazine in 1919.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Nebraska State Journal
My Ántonia (1918) by Willa Cather
My Autobiography (1914) by S. S. McClure and Willa Cather
