Josephine K. Piercy (March 20, 1925)

#0775: Ellen Burns on behalf of Willa Cather to Josephine K. Piercy, March 20, 1925

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Textual Feature	Appearance
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passage deleted by overwritten added letters	~~overwritten passage~~
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

⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ March 20, 1925. Dear Miss Piercy¹:

Miss Cather has gone up into the country⁴ to escape from her friends and correspondentsce, in order to get on with her new novel⁵. I am sure, if she were here, she would answer your questions as far as possible, but she gets so many letters of this kind from universities and colleges, and women's clubs that in order to do her work at all she is driven to escape from her correspondentsce and the heavy drag of letter writing at times. I regret that I cannot myself give you the information you wish, but in order to complete her new novel she must have some time free from interruption.

Respectfully yours, Ellen Burns⁶ Sec'y Miss Josephine K. Piercy¹ 1201 W. Oregon Street Urbana, Illinois³ NEW YORK, N.Y. STA. C² MAR 26 1925 5 30 PM Willa Cather
(secretary)

Information about this letter:

Source File:: cat.let0775.xml
Letter identifier: 0775
Contents: Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only. Includes one envelope, typewritten.
Person to whom letter was written: Josephine K. Piercy¹
Date letter was written: March 20, 1925
Place letter was written: New York, New York, United States²
Location of original letter: McClure MSS. 1865-1949 (LMC 1687), Indiana University, Lilly Library, Bloomington, IN

Individual Annotations

Willa Cather remained in New York City throughout March 1925 and signed at least five other letters on 20 March.

Person Annotations

1520

Piercy, Josephine Ketcham (1895-1995). American academic. Born in Indianapolis, IN, Josephine Piercy received a BA (1918) and MA (1919) from Indiana University, a second MA from Columbia University (1923), and a PhD from Yale University (1937). She began as an instructor at Indiana in 1926 and retired from there as a full professor in 1966. Her scholarly focus growing out of her doctoral work was early American literature, but she also edited Modern Writers at Work (1930 and later editions), an anthology for use in creative writing classes. Cather’s correspondence with Piercy about her potential inclusion in this anthology became contentious.

1761

Burns, Ellen. Name used to sign letters as Cather’s secretary. Several times in the 1920s, letters were signed under the name Ellen Burns, ostensibly Cather’s secretary. These letters were sent when Cather was away from New York City and, in at least one instance, when Cather was feigning being away from New York City. The signatures on these letters and some manuscript corrections strongly suggest that Edith Lewis signed them and likely dictated them (Lewis never learned to type). Put another way, it seems likely that no person named Ellen Burns was actually involved in the production of these letters.

Place Annotations

New York, New York, United States

Urbana, Illinois, United States

Work Annotations

The Professor's House (1925), by Willa Cather