Guide to Reading Letter Transcriptions
Some of these features are only visible when "plain text" is off.
| 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 |
NOV 14 1927
Filed by _____
"In "Death Comes for the Archbishop"3 she has again produced a book which will remain an American classic."
"Miss Cather has recaptured for America4 an aspect of its history. It is not a tragic or a
pathetic tale, but one full of happiness and triumph; and yet it moves one
to tears, by the pixt
picture of such goodness and beauty seen through the medium of a faultless
art." Robert M.
Lovett5 in The New Republic6
I think either of the above quotations7 are good for advertising text; I like the second better8, if it's not too long. I typed them in order to condense them slightly.
Yours W. S. C.Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0913.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0913
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten and typewritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Blanche Wolf Knopf1
- Date letter was written
- [November 13, 1927]
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., Records (MS-00062), University of Texas, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, TX
Individual Annotations
On 15 November 1927, Knopf confirmed that they planned to use as much of the Lovett quote as possible.
Person Annotations
Knopf, Blanche Wolf (1894-1966). Vice President of New York
publisher Alfred Knopf, Inc. Blanche Wolf founded Alfred Knopf,
Inc., in 1915 with her future husband Alfred Knopf. They married in 1916 and
their son Alfred “Pat” Knopf was born in 1918. Active in the business
throughout her life, Blanche Knopf recruited a number of prominent European
and Latin American writers to the Knopf list (in translation) by traveling
to meet them. In recognition of her work with writers such as Jean-Paul
Sartre and Albert Camus, she was inducted into the French Legion of Honor in
1949. She became president of Alfred Knopf, Inc., in 1957 when her husband
became chairman. Through her work in the publishing house she also promoted
writers of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes. Cather’s letters
to Knopf focus primarily on business but the two also became friends.
Lovett, Robert Morss (1870-1956). American writer, editor, educator, and government official. Born in Boston, MA, Robert Lovett graduated from Harvard University in 1892, and after a year teaching at Harvard began a long career teaching English and serving as an administrator at the University of Chicago. With W. V. Moody he wrote The History of English Literature (1902) and The First View of English Literature (1905). He served as editor of the Dial in 1917 and associate editor of the New Republic from 1921 to 1940. At Willa Cather’s suggestion, his October 1927 New Republic review of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) was excerpted on the dust jacket of the 1929 edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop. However, she refused permission to let Lovett use My Ántonia in an edited collection he put together for Houghton Mifflin. He served as government secretary of the U.S. Virgin Islands from 1939 to 1943, but was ousted after the Dies Committee charged him with being a communist subversive. He died in Chicago.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), by Willa Cather
New Republic
"A Death in the Desert," New Republic (October 26, 1927), by Robert Morss Lovett
