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 |
Santa Fe, New Mexico2
FRED HARVEY, MANAGEMENT June 10 My Dear Mr. Mathiessen1;
I would always be glad to assist in any effort to make Miss Jewett5's work better known in our unappreciative country6. My letters and papers are all in New York7, and I shall not be there before December. The review8 of which Mr. Howe9 spoke appeared in the Saturday Literary Review of the N. Y. Evening Post10, first page, a few weeks after Mr. Howe's book11 was published.
Very sincerely yours Willa Cather LA FONDA Santa Fe, New Mexico2 FRED HARVEY, MANAGEMENT Mr. Francis O. Mathiessen1 10 Farwell Place Cambridge 3 Mass. SANTA FE N. MAX2 JUN 8 1926 11 AM 5 Bank Street, NY 8 W 40 St R. 1604c/o Carlton Eberhard[?]
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0839.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0839
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Francis O. Matthiessen 1
- Date letter was written
- June 10 [1926]
- Place letter was written
- Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States2
- Location of original letter
- F. O. Matthiessen Papers (YCAL MSS 495), Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT
Individual Annotations
Hotel La Fonda (Santa Fe, NM): Luxury hotel in Santa Fe, NM, which was built in 1922. The hotel was owned by the Atchison, Topeka Santa Fe Railway and managed by Fred Harvey when Cather and Edith Lewis stayed there in the summers of 1925 and 1926.
Person Annotations
Matthiessen, Francis Otto (1902-1950). American educator, literary
critic, and scholar. Born in Pasadena, CA, Matthiessen received
an A.B. from Yale University (1919), a B. Litt. from Oxford University
(1925), where he was a Rhodes scholar, and an MA and PhD from Harvard
University (1926). During his years as an English instructor at Yale
University from 1927 to 1929 he researched and wrote Sarah
Orne Jewett (1929), published by Houghton Mifflin and featuring
illustrations by his partner, painter Russell Cheney. Matthiessen and Cather
briefly corresponded about his research for this book. From 1929 he rose
quickly through the ranks at Harvard University and became one of the most
influential scholars of American literature of his generation. He is best
known for his book American Renaissance: Art and
Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941).
Jewett, Sarah Orne (1849-1909). American short story writer and
novelist. Born in South Berwick, ME, Jewett began sharing homes
in Boston (at 148 Charles Street) and Manchester-on-the-Sea, MA, with Annie
Adams Fields in 1881, while continuing to live in her family home in South
Berwick with her mother and sister part of the year. She was associated
throughout her career with the Atlantic Monthly, and
her best-known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs,
was serialized there in 1896. Like much of her fiction, it focused on rural
and small town New England life. By the time Cather met Jewett at 148
Charles Street in 1908, Jewett had largely ceased writing because of a
spinal concussion she suffered in a 1902 carriage accident. She wrote
important letters of advice to Cather in 1908, criticizing her decision to
write "The Gull's Road" (1908) from the perspective of a male character,
which she called "something of a masquerade" (27 Nov. 1908), and urging her
to give up her editorial work at McClure's Magazine
so she could focus full-time on fiction writing (13 Dec. 1908). After
Jewett's death in South Berwick in 1909, Cather often referred to her and
her advice about writing. Cather edited The Best Stories
of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925) for publisher Houghton Mifflin, and in
her preface classed The Country of the Pointed Firs
with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Nathaniel
Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as one of "three
American books which have the possibility of a long, long life."
Howe, Mark Antony De Wolfe (1864-1960). American author and editor. Born in Rhode Island and raised in Pennsylvania, Howe earned a BA from Lehigh University and a second BA and an MA in English literature from Harvard University. He worked as assistant editor of the Youth’s Companion from 1888 to 1893 and of the Atlantic Monthly from 1893 to 1895. In 1899 he married Fanny Quincy, daughter of Boston mayor Josiah Quincy, and returned to editorial work on the Youth’s Companion, which he continued until 1923. He became firmly associated with his adopted city, writing and editing books about it and its famous figures, including Memories of a Hostess: A Chronicle of Eminent Friendships Drawn Chiefly from the Diaries of Mrs. James T. Fields (1922), which Cather reviewed for the Atlantic Monthly and which inspired her essay “The House on Charles Street” (1922, later revised and retitled “148 Charles Street” [1936]). Cather corresponded with Howe in 1911 about a biographical essay he submitted for McClure’s Magazine, and they may have corresponded earlier when Cather’s poem “The Night Express” appeared in the Youth’s Companion or met in person at the Boston home Fields shared with Sarah Orne Jewett. As executor of Fields’ literary estate, Howe corresponded with Cather about the disposition of her letters to Fields. He died in Cambridge, MA.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
"The House on Charles Street," Literary Review (November 4, 1922) by Willa Cather
New York Evening Post
Memories of a Hostess (1922) by M. A. De Wolfe Howe
