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 |
NORTH 6127 38 SAINT VINCENT STREET
TORONTO2 April 14th Dear Mr. Scaife1;
From several newspapers sent me from the West, I gather that Mr. Lewis3 has been giving me very generous attention in his lectures. In some places this may possibly make some demand for my books, as he mentions them each by name and warmly exhorts his audience to buy them at once. I've never met Mr. Lewis, but this is surely fine and generous of him. I send this press notice4 thinking you might feel it worth while to see that there are some of my books to be had in the cities where he has given them such liberal publicity.
I understood Mr. Greenslet5 to say that a statement would be sent me the first of April, as usual. So far none has come. Will you please let me know about it?
Sincerley yours Willa CatherBy the way, when does Mr. Greenslet return6?
I don't know what Mr. Lewis's lecture route has been, but he said a great deal about my books in Omaha7 and Kansas City8.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0540.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0540
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Roger L. Scaife1
- Date letter was written
- April 14 [1921]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The year of this letter is established by corresponding letters from Houghton Mifflin staff.
- Place letter was written
- Toronto, Ontario, Canada2
- Location of original letter
- Houghton Mifflin Company Correspondence and Records (MSAm1925), Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA
Individual Annotations
It is likely that Cather enclosed a 9 April 1921 Omaha World Herald article "Lewis Praises the Work of Nebraska Authoress" reporting on his 8 April 1921 speech sponsored by the Omaha Society of Fine Arts at the Fontenelle. The article begins "Nebraska's foremost citizen is Willa Sibert Cather, novelist, and her name will be associated with the state long after other names have been forgotten, according to Sinclair Lewis." As a Nebraskan he called Cather "greater" than General Pershing and Williams Jenning Bryan and as a fiction writer classed her with Edith Wharton and Frank Norris as "the highest type of fiction writer in America."
Ferris Greenslet was in England.
Person Annotations
Scaife, Roger Livingston (1875-1951). Head of publicity at Houghton Mifflin. An 1897 graduate of Harvard University, Scaife went to work for Houghton Mifflin in 1898 as assistant to Azaria Smith, head of the publicity department. Scaife subsequently assumed Smith’s position and became a shareholder of the corporation and secretary of the board of directors. In 1910, when Ferris Greenslet became editor in chief of the trade department, Scaife divided his shares 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. Scaife anonymously published three satirical novels with Houghton Mifflin, The Confessions of a Debutante (1913), Cape Codities (1920), and The Reflections of a T.B.M. (1920), and two books of children’s verse under his own name. Cather corresponded primarily with Greenslet about her novels, but in his absence she dealt with Scaife during the production of My Ántonia (1918), and her dissatisfaction with decisions made on his authority contributed to her decision to transfer her publishing business to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. In 1934 Scaife left Houghton Mifflin to become executive vice president of Little, Brown. He later became the fourth director of Harvard University Press.
Lewis, Sinclair (1885-1951). American novelist. Born
in Sauke Centre, MN, Sinclair Lewis graduated from Yale University in 1908.
Although he published short stories and several novels in the teens, he
achieved critical and popular success with Main
Street (1920), which satirized Midwestern provincialism. On a 1921
lecture tour, he regularly praised Cather’s work. He continued with a string
of popular and critical successes, including Babbitt
(1922), Arrowsmith (1925) (for which he declined the
Pulitzer Prize for fiction), Mantrap (1926), and Elmer Gantry (1927). Even though he depicted One of Ours (1922) as a failure in his New York Evening Post review, Cather invited him to
tea and said she was not “a particle sore at him” (#0624). Although they
infrequently saw each other in person, they remained on good terms, and when
Lewis was the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature,
he praised Cather in his acceptance speech. Lewis was married and divorced
twice, first to Grace Livingston Hegger and then to Dorothy Thompson. Later,
he lived with Rosemary Marcella Powers, whom Cather met. Lewis’s later
career was marred by his alcoholism, which led to his death in Rome,
Italy.
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.
Place Annotations
