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#0605: Willa Cather to Helen McAfee, June 22, 1922

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5 Bank Street3, New York City2 June
22nd
1922 My dear Miss McAfee1:

I will do it4 for you sometime - I really will. But this winter there has simply been the devil to pay. The new book5, thank heaven, is gone and the last page proof is read, and now I am going to strike work for awhile.

No, I can't say I feel much happier without tonsils than with them. My advice to the next candidate is, don't.!

I am going up to Vermont6 next week and perhaps up there I may find some wise ideas for you.

Cordially yours, Willa Cather Miss Helen McAfee, The Yale Review7, New Haven, Conn.8

Information about this letter:

Source File:
cat.let0605.xml
Letter identifier
0605
Contents
Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
Person to whom letter was written
Helen McAfee 1
Date letter was written
June 22, 1922
Place letter was written
New York, New York, United States2
Location of original letter
Yale Review Records, 1911-1949 (YCAL MSS 145), Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT

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 3 December 1921, McAfee reported to Cather that Edith Lewis had told her Cather was lecturing in the West, and McAfee proposed that she and Cather meet when she was in New York City to discuss a possible article for the Yale Review. See also #0572 to Wilbur Cross, who followed up on the idea.

Person Annotations

0286

McAfee, Helen Flora (1884-1956). American editor. McAfee was born in Marblehead, CT, and in 1903 graduated from Smith College, where she and Edith Lewis belonged to the same literary society. She taught English in New Haven, CT, from 1903 to 1909, taking graduate courses in English at Yale University from 1908 to 1909. She served as head of the English department of the American College for Girls in Constantinople, Turkey, from 1909 to 1912. On returning to graduate studies at Yale, she worked as editorial assistant at the Yale Review. She earned her A.M. in 1914, and Yale University Press published her thesis Pepys on the Restoration Stage in 1916. She continued as assistant editor of the Yale Review under Wilbur Cross and later became managing editor. She corresponded widely with authors, including Willa Cather, seeking contributions, and also wrote articles and reviews.

Place Annotations

New York, New York, United States
Vermont, United States
New Haven, Connecticut, United States

Work Annotations

One of Ours (1922) by Willa Cather

Yale Review

© 2004-2024, Willa Cather Archive. Emily J. Rau, editor. Updated 2023. The Willa Cather Archive is freely distributed by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. UNL Logo