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 |
I am not only grateful to you for sending me Miss Gerber3's Cliff Dweller Bibliography4, but for letting me know where she is. She wrote me sometime in January that she was coming "East",—which is a rather large stretch of country after all, when you start from Denver5. She had tea with me here6 in my study last Wednesday, and seems to be enjoying her new work very keenly, though she is a bit homesick for Denver and her Denver friends.
With warmest regards to Mrs. Wyer7 and yourself, I am
Faithfully yours, Willa CatherInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0821.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0821
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typwritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Malcolm Wyer 1
- Date letter was written
- February 15, 1926
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- L. Tom Perry Special Collections Library (Vault MSS 788), Brigham Young University, L. Tom Perry Special Collections Library, Harold B. Lee Library, Provo, UT
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.
Person Annotations
Wyer, Malcolm Glenn (1877-1965). Librarian. Malcolm Wyer was born in Kansas and grew up in Minnesota, graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1899. After graduating from the New York State Library School in Albany, NY, he became librarian at the University of Iowa (1904-1913), the University of Nebraska (1913-1924), and the Denver, CO, City Library (1924-1951). While in Denver he worked to strengthen the library’s collection of Western American history in cooperation with the University of Denver. Cather did research for Death Comes for the Archbishop at the Denver library in 1925, where she also met Louise Guerber Burroughs, who became a friend. Wyer married Charlotte Spalding in 1906; they had one daughter.
Burroughs, Ella Louise Guerber (1900-1985) (“Louise”). American librarian and curator. Ella Louise Guerber was born in Allentown, PA, and graduated from Cedar Crest College in 1919 and then the library school at Columbia University. At the time she met Cather in 1925, she was a reference librarian at the Denver Public Library and assisted Cather with her research on Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). In 1926, Guerber moved to New York City to take a position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she saw Cather frequently in person. She married Bryson Burroughs, Curator of Paintings, in 1928; he died in 1934. In 1950, when she received an honorary degree from Cedar Crest, she was Associate Curator of Paintings at the Met. After her retirement, she moved to Baltimore, MD, and then Princeton, NJ, where she died. Her friendship with Cather is documented by more than seventy letters from Cather to Burroughs from 1925 through Cather’s late life and by a diary documenting her in-person interactions with Cather from 1925 through 1927.
Wyer, Charlotte Spalding (1883-after 1964). Wife of Malcolm Wyer. Charlotte Spalding was born in Morrill, KS, and moved with her family to Lincoln, NE, when she was young. She was a member of the University of Nebraska class of 1906; she met Malcolm Wyer when he was at Colorado College in 1903-04. They were married in 1906 and had one daughter.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Cliff Dwellers and Cliff Dwellings of North America: A Selected Bibliography (1925), by Louise Guerber
