Cyril Clemens (February 27, 1933) | Willa Cather Archive

#1166: Willa Cather to Cyril Clemens, February 27, 1933

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⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ February 27, 1933. My dear Mr. Clemens¹:

The fact that I have been away from New York² for some time will explain why I have not replied to your note and thanked you for sending me Miss Hazen's³ letter about ANTONIA⁴. Any writer would certainly be pleased to receive so sympathetic an estimate of his book, presented so clearly and forcefully. Miss Hazen has a most unusual gift of analysis - would that a few of our professional book reviewers had the same gift. If there is anything good in the book, certainly Miss Hazen has discerned exactly what it is and has defined it without rambling all over the place. Thank you again for sending it to me.

Most sincerely yours, Willa Cather

Information about this letter:

Source File:: cat.let1166.xml
Letter identifier: 1166
Contents: Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
Person to whom letter was written: Cyril Clemens¹
Date letter was written: February 27, 1933
Place letter was written: New York, New York, United States²
Location of original letter: WCPM Collection, National Willa Cather Center, Red Cloud, NE

Person Annotations

0266

Clemens, Cyril (1902-1999). American biographer. A distant cousin of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain), Cyril Clemens was born in St. Louis, MO, to James R. and Kathryn T. Clemens, and received his BA and MA from Washington University (St. Louis). He founded the International Mark Twain Society in 1930 and edited its journal, the Mark Twain Quarterly, from 1936-1982. He wrote biographies and biographical sketches of his famous cousin and other literary figures, including G.K. Chesterton and A.E. Housman. The Mark Twain Society awarded a medal to Cather in 1934; Clemens asked Cather for contributions to the journal and pressed her for information about her 1902 visit to Housman.

1211

Hazen, Margaret Paige (1903-after 1955). American librarian and critic. Born in Plymouth, MA, to Mary A. Monroe and James W. Hazen, Margaret Hazen earned her BS from Boston University and worked as a librarian for Medford Public Libraries from 1921 to 1929. In 1930 she graduated from the Pratt Institute School of Library Science, becoming a reference librarian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hazen co-authored Library Work (1945) and The Library Profession (1955) and wrote book reviews for the Boston Evening Transcript. Her review of My Ántonia (1918) won a contest held by the Mark Twain Society which invited participants to answer the prompt, “what I consider the most representative novel from 1900 to 1931 and why.”

Place Annotations

New York, New York, United States

Work Annotations

My Ántonia (1918), by Willa Cather