Carl Glick (March 20, 1925) | Willa Cather Archive

#0776: Willa Cather to Carl Glick, March 20, 1925

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⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ March 20, 1925. My dear Mr. Glick¹:

I read the bunch of themes you sent with interest. It seemed to me that the most interesting ones were those by Lois Bradford³, Philip Wilcox⁴ and L. Frantz⁵.

I see that most of the students flounder about with those wretched old terms "Romantic" and "Realistic". Wouldn't it be possible once and for all to limit the Romantic Novel with the Scott⁶ and Dumas⁷ kind of plot construction, and somehow get it into the student's mind that a romantic novel may have nothing to do with what we ordinarily call romantic feeling - that "Romantic" in this case hasn't an adjective force, but is merely part of the name? It really should be combined with the noun as it would be in German. Unless the romantic novel is limited to one with a definite sort of plot construction, there is no end to the ambiguities which follow.

Give my regards to your class, and tell them I hope I do not write entirely without romantic feeling, but that I could not write a real Romantic Novel like "The Three Musketeers"⁸ to save my life.

Very cordially yours, Willa Cather

Information about this letter:

Source File:: cat.let0776.xml
Letter identifier: 0776
Contents: Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
Person to whom letter was written: Carl Glick ¹
Date letter was written: March 20, 1925
Place letter was written: New York, New York, United States²
Location of original letter: Willa Cather Papers, 1899-1949, in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library (6494), University of Virginia, Special Collections, Charlottesville, VA

Person Annotations

1756

Glick, Carl (1890-1971). American author and academic. Born in Iowa, Carl Glick was involved in theater at Northwestern University, from which he graduated in 1915. He founded a series of community theaters in Iowa, Texas, and Sarasota, while teaching at colleges and universities. He was the author of seventeen books, nine plays, and many short stories and magazine articles, some inspired by his work supervising a boys club in Chinatown in New York City under the supervision of the Emergency Works Bureau. In 1925, when he was teaching at the University of Colorado, he sent Cather his students’ themes about her works.

1758

Lund, Lois R. Bradford (1905-1983). American college student. Lois R. Lund was born and raised in Colorado and attended the University of Colorado, where, in 1925, Carl Glick, her English professor, sent her class theme on Cather to the author. In 1927 in Durango, Lois Bradford married Bruce Lund.

1757

Wilcox, Philip Connacher (1904-1970). American businessman. Born and raised in Denver, CO, Philip Wilcox graduated from the University of Colorado and then spent his career in Colorado, Texas, and New York, working for the Mountain State Telephone Co. When he was a student in 1925, Carl Glick, his professor at the University of Colorado, sent Wilcox’s class theme on Cather to the author.

1759

Frantz, L. College student. In 1925, Carl Glick sent a class theme to Cather by a student identified as L. Frantz. No further information is known about this person.

1579

Scott, Walter (1771-1832) (“Sir Walter Scott”). Scottish writer. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Walter Scott spent part of his childhood in the Scottish countryside, where he learned traditional songs and stories. Trained as a lawyer, he won international fame with his poetry on Scottish themes. His first novel, Waverley (1814), was also an international success, although published anonymously; it was followed by many other popular historical novels of adventure and heroism. Scott was made a baronet in 1820.

1768

Dumas, Alexandre (1802-1870) (“Alexandre Dumas, père [father]”). French writer. Born in France, grandson of a French nobleman and a Black enslaved woman, Marie-Cessette Dumas, Alexandre Dumas began his career as a journalist, and then as a playwright; his first play was produced in 1829. He began writing novels, often in serial form, around 1838. Usually historical in setting, filled with adventure and heightened emotions of love, hatred, and revenge, they became wildly popular and were widely translated; many were made into plays, and later into films. The demand was such that Dumas set up a production studio to do some of the actual writing, following his plots and under his editorship. Dumas married actress Ida Ferrari, but had many mistresses and several children out of marriage, including his namesake, Alexandre Dumas, fils [son]. Cather, especially in her youth, was a devoted reader of such Dumas novels as The Three Musketeers (1844), The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-46), and many others. Her reviews in the late 1890s praised the return of Dumas-like historical romances such as The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) in contrast to more realistic and analytical Victorian novels.

Place Annotations

New York, New York, United States

Work Annotations

The Three Musketeers (1844) by Alexandre Dumas