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 |
The Bookman4
arrived today5 in the devastated district6 of Bank
street, which is not undergoing reconstruction. The ad7 pleases me very much, even as to text, which
I thkI think very much better than any
you have used before.
The Swedish edition8 of "O Pioneers!"9 also arrived, with
its seemingly profane title10. By
the way, when you have occasion to bind more copies of that book, won,t you please change the color of the binding-cloth11? That clay-mud brown id is really too ugly. Please either select
some good color yourself, or use a sober brown like the enclosed sample.
I send a letter12 from your firm which reached me at Jaffrey13 when I was sick. Please tell the writer of it that there is material in that subject for a popular book, and I would like to do it some time for the Western material I would get on the side. That is one many things I want to talk to you about when you are next in this congested town2. About the first of next month, did you say14? Please let me know, before you come, when and where I can telephone you. Our15 telephone was ripped out when this house was looted, and rewiring is so difficult through these thick walls that the Telephone Company won't give us any date for installing a new one. But there are several important things about which I want to see you.
Influenza and moving have consumed a great deal of time, but I expect to beging work on Claude16 this monday next.
Faithfully W. S. C.Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0480.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0480
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Ferris Greenslet1
- Date letter was written
- October 18 [1919]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The year of this letter is established by corresponding letters from Houghton Mifflin staff.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Harvard University, Houghton Library Houghton Mifflin Company correspondence and records, 1832-1944 (MSAm1925), Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA
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.
On 14 October 1919, Greenslet wrote that he had sent a copy of the "current" Bookman to Cather and directed her attention to "the frontispiece opposite the first page of text."
Cather and Edith Lewis had packed up their apartment in anticipation of construction of a new subway station at 14th St., which did not ultimately happen until 1927.
The advertisement, which likely appeared in an advertising supplement distributed with the Bookman, has not been located.
On 15 October 1919, Greenslet sent Cather this volume, querying "I can't read it, can you?"
In 1919, C. E. Fritzes Bokförlags Aktiebolag of Stockholm, Sweden, published a translation of O Pioneers! by Hildengard Wieselgren under the title Hell, Banbrytare!
The binding of O Pioneers! as published in 1913.
On 12 September 1919, a Houghton Mifflin staff member whose name is not recorded on the carbon copy of the letter, wrote concerning Cather's essay "The Education You Have to Fight For" in the October 1919 Red Cross Magazine and queried "wether there is not in it potential book material."
On 11 October 1919, Greenslet wrote that he was supposed to have lunch with Hugh Walpole in New York the first week of November.
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.
Lewis, Edith Labaree (1881-1972). Magazine editor,
advertising copywriter, and Cather's domestic partner. Born in
Lincoln, NE, to Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Edith Lewis
attended the preparatory school associated with the University of Nebraska,
earning college credits from the University before transferring to Smith
College in Northampton, MA, in 1899. She received an A.B. in English from
Smith in 1902 and returned home to teach elementary school. She met Willa
Cather in the summer of 1903 at the home of Sarah Harris, publisher of the
Lincoln Courier. Moving to New York City soon
afterward, Lewis settled into a studio on Washington Square and found work
at the Century Publishing Company. Cather was her guest when she visited the
city from Pittsburgh. In 1906, at Cather's suggestion, Lewis applied for a
position as an editorial proofreader at McClure's
Magazine, and the two women worked together on the McClure's staff for six years. In 1908, they moved
into a shared apartment at 82 Washington Place, and then, in 1912, to Five
Bank Street. Lewis left McClure's in 1915 to become
managing editor of Every Week Magazine, where she
stayed until the magazine folded in 1918. In 1919 she began a long career as
an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Co. In 1926 Edith Lewis
acquired the land on which she and Cather built their cottage on Grand Manan
Island. When they lost their apartment on Bank Street to subway construction
in 1927, they shared quarters at the Grosvenor Hotel when they were both in
New York City. In 1932 they took an apartment at 570 Park Avenue. Throughout
their relationship, Lewis was closely involved in Cather's creative process,
reading and editing her work in pre-publication forms. Cather's will
appointed Lewis as executor of her literary estate and a beneficiary of her
literary trust. Lewis authorized E.K. Brown as Cather's first biographer and
published her own memoir of Cather, Willa Cather
Living (1953). She remained in their Park Avenue apartment after
Cather's death and died there after a long period of illness and invalidism.
She is buried at Cather's side in Jaffrey, NH.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Bookman
O Pioneers! (1913) by Willa Cather
One of Ours (1922) by Willa Cather
