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 |
You have probably not followed the controversy4 in the Tribune5 about Antonia.6 The enclosed is an extract7. I will tell you what I think8 about Mr. Mulder's9 book10 when I see you. When, by the way, shall I see you? Is there any chance of your being in town2 before January 7th? I would like to have a session with you before that date if possible.
Within a few days I have had to autograph four copies of "O Pioneers!"11 three of them for publishers, it
is true, but they had price marks on the front page, so I think they were
honestly bought. The ugliness of that mustard-plaster binding12 has begun to get on my nerves. I have
always thoug hoped that if the book kept
alive you would, of your own accord, give it a new binding. Now, won't you
please tell me how many are left bound up in this ugly cloth, and whether
you will be willing to give it a new binding in the cloth I sent you
sometime ago. The typography is good, and you used to print it on good
paper; why not drop the incongruous colored frontispiece13, give it a decent binding, and let it
look like the book that it has proved itself to be. Please let me hear from
you definitely about this. If your people do not want to bother about the
book, and would like to get rid of it, tell me upon what terms.
I have promised Mr. Knopf14 that he can
bring out a new edition15 of the "Troll Garden"16 stories, as he has
made me very generous terms. This, I am sure will not displease you, as
Houghton Mifflin have never shown even a momentary interest17 in reviving these this volume. The plates18 were destroyed, so it will have to be set anew.
Mr. Knopf would like, of course, to bring it out in the early spring.
However, if you are to bring out C B
"Claude"19, there might be some
unfairness to you, and incidentally to myself, in letting the impetus of
"Antonia" be transferred to this book or earlier work instead of passing it
on directly to "Claude". If you advise, I will stipulate that the volume20, which will have a
discriminating introduction by an interested person, does not come out until
six weeks or two months after Claude. I suppose he will be dashed when I
make this condition about the date of publication, but I expect you will
agree with me that I had better make it. He
Knopf will make a handsome book for
me, and the introduction will state clearly that the stories are early work.
I think it a sporting proposition of in him,
and I shall be interested to see what he can do with such a slight book.
P. S. There is a phrase in Miss
Birtwell's21
letter22 that ought to direct
the advertising of the
books mentioned23; that the fine thing is rare, very. But your
publicity man24 will never,
never be bold enough to use that phrase. What he sauys
is, "All our books are fin the fine
thing, our great country is full of them, genuine interpreters of
American life" With one exception, the page ad25 in the Bookman26, the copy he prepares for me would
do just as well for Clara Louise
Burnham27. Please show your publicity man this post script,
and ask him if all books read just alike to him.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0489.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0489
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, typewritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Ferris Greenslet1
- Date letter was written
- December 28, 1919
- 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
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.
Cather's extract does not survive, but the controversy began when a letter from Lorna Birtwell was quoted at length in "Reviews from Readers" on 29 November 1919. She challenged Heywood Broun's review of Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, (1919), suggesting that Cather's portrayal of an artist in The Song of the Lark (1915) was far superior and that Broun should advise people to read My Ántonia and Cather generally as she was "producing the real American novel." In his "Books" column on 5 December 1919, Broun responded by reporting that he was halfway through reading My Ántonia but glossed over Birtwell's championing of The Song of the Lark. In "About a Column" on 20 December 1919, another Birtwell letter was published, in which she championed The Song of the Lark and O Pioneers! over My Ántonia but concluded "Because she is so fine--and the fine thing is so rare--and an American, and a woman, I am almost passionately desirous that you should put Willa Sibert Cather, completely before your public."
On 17 December 1919, Greenslet sent Cather a copy of Arnold Mulder's Outbound Road, published by Houghton Mifflin. He told her he thought Mulder was still learning but was "in the path of rectitude," and he would like her opinion.
The binding of O Pioneers! as published in 1913.
An image of Alexandra Bergson by illustrator Clarence F. Underwood used as a frontispiece
of O Pioneers! from its original publication in 1913.
See #0430 and #0431 on Houghton Mifflin's lack of interest.
On the disposition of the plates, see #0369.
Youth and the Bright Medusa included four of the seven stories collected in The Troll Garden plus four additional stories about art and artists more recently published in magazines. There was no "discriminating introduction" to the volume, and One of Ours was ultimately published in 1922 by Knopf, not Houghton Mifflin.
See above about the "controversy in the Tribune."
See #0480.
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.
Mulder, Arnold (1889-1959). American editor, author, and academic. Born in a region of Michigan settled by Dutch Calvinists, Arnold Mulder edited newspapers and magazines before serving as head of the Kalamazoo College English department from 1929 until his death. In 1913 he began publishing regional fiction set in Michigan’s Dutch Calvinist communities. Cather scoffed when R.L. Scaife of Houghton Mifflin sent her a copy of The Outbound Road (1919), Mulder’s first novel published by the firm, in an apparent attempt to get her to blurb it.
Knopf, Alfred A. (1892-1984). President of New York
publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Knopf received his BA from
Columbia University in New York City in 1912 and founded Alfred Knopf, Inc.,
in 1915 with his future wife Blanche Wolf. They married in 1916, and their
son Alfred “Pat” Knopf was born in 1918. Cather chose him as her publisher
beginning with Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920) and
One of Ours (1922), partly because she was
dissatisfied with the promotion of her books by Houghton Mifflin but also
because she recognized the high quality of Knopf's books, as well as what
she regarded as his intelligent advertising. Knopf was noted for publishing
the work of leading European and South American writers in translation, as
well as original works. Knopf and Cather’s extensive correspondence
testifies to their mutual professional respect and to what also became an
important personal friendship.
Birtwell, Lorna (1888-after 1948). American writer and teacher.
Born in Massachusetts, Lorna R. F. Birtwell attended Radcliffe
College, where she wrote for the student magazine, graduating in 1911. Willa
Cather relished two of Birtwell’s letters to Heywood Broun of the New York Tribune, published in the paper in 1919,
which championed Cather’s works. As an aspiring writer, Birtwell attended
several summer sessions of the Bread Loaf School of English. At the 1922
session she met Cather, who invited her to attend her Friday teas at 5 Bank
Street. By 1930 Birtwell taught short story writing in the Columbia
University Extension Division, co-editing a volume of student work. She
published an essay, “Remembering Willa Cather,” about the Bread Loaf time,
in Women’s Press (1948).
Linscott, Robert N. (1886-1964). American editor. Linscott began as an office boy at Houghton Mifflin in 1904 at age seventeen. He became the company’s advertising manager, handling publicity for some of Cather’s books, and later moved to the editorial side, handling works by Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, and others. He moved to Random House in 1944, where he edited several anthologies, including a best-selling edition of Emily Dickinson’s letters and poetry.
Burnham, Clara Louise Root (1854-1926). American writer. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, a daughter of composer and businessman George Root and Mary Woodman Root, Clara Root grew up in Chicago, IL. She began writing soon after her marriage to Walter Burnham; her first novel, No Gentlemen (1881), was successful, and she became a prolific writer of novels, stories, and verse. Three of her novels had explicitly Christian Science themes; one of them, Jewel (1903), was made into films in 1915 and 1923. Burnham had a summer home in Maine, and some of her fiction is set in New England; Willa Cather complained that Houghton Mifflin’s advertising failed to distinguish her work from Burnham’s (#0489).
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
"Books," New York Tribune (December 5, 1919) by Heywood Broun
"Reviews from Readers: Various Points of View Expressed About Maugham and May Sinclair," New York Tribune (November 29, 1919)
"About a Column: The Work of Willa Sibert Cather," New York Tribune (November 20, 1919) by Lorna R. F. Birtwell
New York Tribune
My Ántonia (1918) by Willa Cather
The Outbound Road (1919) by Arnold Mulder
O Pioneers! (1913) by Willa Cather
Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920) by Willa Cather
The Troll Garden (1905) by Willa Cather
One of Ours (1922) by Willa Cather
O Pioneers! (1913) by Willa Cather
The Song of the Lark (1915) by Willa Cather
Bookman
