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 |
The Grosvenor3
35 FIFTH AVENUE
New York2 F.G. December 4, 1930. Dear Mr. Greenslet1:
I am so sorry to see that all the Benda4 drawings have been dropped from MY ANTONIA5, though the title page still boldly declares "with illustrations by W. T. Benda"! Don't you think6 that line should be dropped from the title page unless you can restore the drawings to future printings?
But if the title page has to be revised, I beg you on no account to drop the line7 from Virgil8 in italics. When your people made up an edition of O PIONEERS9 for the Riverside Classics10, they dropped out a quotation11 on the title page without consulting me, which I do not think was polite of them.
[illegible]I suppose the fact is that the Benda plates were so badly worn that you decided not
to run them any more.; and the original drawings are in storage12 with all my goods and
chattels - I would not know how to get at them without demolishing the whole
pile.
bBut I like the drawings, and I
miss them very much. When any radical change of that kind is contemplated in the
make-up of a book, couldn't you let me know about it.?
I beg you as a personal favor to find two copies of MY ANTONIA with the Benda illustrations, and have them sent to me. I want them for some friends in France13 to whom the pictures would mean something.
abks.[?] Faithfully yours, Willa CatherInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1028.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1028
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Ferris Greenslet1
- Date letter was written
- December 4, 1930
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Houghton Mifflin Company correspondence and records, 1832-1944 (MSAm1925), Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA
Individual Annotations
Grosvenor Hotel (New York City): When Cather and Edith Lewis lost their 5 Bank Street apartment in 1927, they moved into the Grosvenor Hotel, where they continued to live until 1932. The hotel was located at 35 Fifth Avenue in the Manhattan borough of New York City.
On 6 December 1930, Greenslet responded that he was surprised to hear the drawings were dropped but explained that the plates were not fresh and, in light of rising manufacturing costs and Cather's 20 per cent royalty rate, Houghton Mifflin stopped printing the illustrations "to protect our margin." He promised, however, to protect the Virgil quotation on the title page and to put the quotation back on the O Pioneers! title page.
O Pioneers! was first offered in the Riverside Library Star Series in 1929.
Because Cather and Edith Lewis had no New York apartment from 1927 until late 1932.
Person Annotations
Greenslet, Ferris (1875-1959). American editor and writer.
Born in Glens Falls, NY, Ferris Greenslet earned a BA (1897) from
Wesleyan University and a PhD (1900) from Columbia University. He served as
associate editor at the Atlantic Monthly from 1902 to
1907, and married Ella Stoothoff Hulst in 1903; they had two children,
Marguerite (born 1904) and George (born 1906). As an author he specialized
in biography. He became literary editor at Houghton Mifflin, the Boston
publisher of the Atlantic, c. 1908 and was socially
and professionally acquainted with Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett,
who may have introduced him to Cather. He evidently solicited Cather to
submit Alexander’s Bridge (1912), her first published
novel, to Houghton Mifflin. In 1910, when Greenslet became editor in chief
of the trade department, Roger Scaife divided his shares as a director of
the company with him, and the two presented themselves to authors as
partners, with Scaife handling book advertising and format and Greenslet
negotiating contracts and supervising editing; when Greenslet was absent
from the office, Scaife handled correspondence with Cather. Greenslet became
a director of Houghton Mifflin in 1919 and manager of the trade department
in 1933. Cather left Houghton Mifflin as a publisher for Alfred A. Knopf,
Inc., because she became dissatisfied with the production and advertising of
her books. However, she remained on cordial terms with Greenslet and
undertook several projects for him after her departure. Her extant letters
to him constitute one of the largest groups to a single correspondent.
Benda, W. T. (1873-1948) ("Wladyslaw Theodor") . Polish-born
American graphic artist. Born in Poland, W.T. Benda studied art
in Krakow and in Vienna, Austria. In 1899, he came to the U.S. to visit his
aunt, actress Helena Modjeska, and worked on her ranch in California until
1902, when he moved to New York City and studied at the Art Students League.
He became well known for his illustrations appearing in both books and
leading magazines, including McClure's during
Cather's editorship there. He was particularly known for his
charcoal-and-wash drawings of exotic beauties known as “Benda women.”
Naturalized as an American citizen in 1911, Benda married Romola Campfield,
with whom he had two daughters, and lived the rest of his life in New York.
Willa Cather chose Benda to illustrate My Ántonia
(1918), and the payment for and number of these illustrations became a
source of conflict with publisher Houghton Mifflin.
Virgil (70BCE-19 BCE). Roman poet, author of the Aeneid and Georgics. As a girl in Red Cloud, NE, Willa Cather studied Virgil with William Ducker, an educated Englishman who was a businessman in the town; when she continued her studies of Latin and Greek at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, she read with him in the summers. Virgil’s influence is apparent in Cather’s poems in April Twilights (1905), and Jim Burden, the narrator of My Ántonia (1918), studies Virgil at the University of Nebraska with Gaston Cleric. Jim experiences a key moment of insight when reading Virgil’s Georgics, and a quotation from the Georgics (“Optima dies . . . prima fugit”: The best days are the first to flee) appears as an epigraph to Cather’s novel.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
My Ántonia (1918) by Willa Cather
Georgics by Virgil
O Pioneers! (1913) by Willa Cather
Pan Tadeusz (1834) by Adam Mickiewicz
