Carl Van Doren (March 7, 1934) | Willa Cather Archive

#1217: Willa Cather to Carl Van Doren, March 7, 1934

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⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ March 7, 1934. My dear Mr. Van Doren¹:

I wish you had asked me something³ that I could agree⁴ to, for I would mightily like to oblige you. This seems to be an age of anthologies and of text books made up from excerpts from novels. I have given permission to have portions of nearly all of my books used in this way, but I have always refused to allow any extracts to be made from MY ANTONIA⁵ ~~and~~ or A LOST LADY⁶. Even when MY ANTONIA was put on the college requirement list, I prevailed upon Houghton Mifflin not to make a cheap edition⁷ of it. I also persuaded them not to publish an abbreviated version of MY ANTONIA in a series of abbreviated college requirements which they were publishing. For the last few years I have had a continual struggle to keep ANTONIA from being dismembered, but I mean to keep up the struggle. I am sure you will agree with me that there is not much satisfaction in writing books at all unless one can have some things the way one wants them.

Faithfully yours, Willa Cather Mr. Carl Van Doren¹, 8 West 13th Street New York City². NEW YORK, N. Y. STA Y² MAR 10 1934 2-PM

Information about this letter:

Source File:: cat.let1217.xml
Letter identifier: 1217
Contents: Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only. Includes one typewritten envelope.
Person to whom letter was written: Carl Van Doren¹
Date letter was written: March 7, 1934
Place letter was written: New York, New York, United States²
Location of original letter: Carl Van Doren Papers (C0072), Princeton University, Firestone Library, Princeton, NJ

Individual Annotations

In #1218, she agreed to his request to anthologize The Song of the Lark instead.

See #1109 and #1130.

Person Annotations

1979

Van Doren, Carl Clinton (1885-1950). American writer and critic. Born in Illinois, son of Charles L. Van Doren and Eudora Butz Van Doren, Carl graduated from the University of Illinois in 1907, and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1911. There he met fellow graduate student Irita Bradford; they married in 1912 and had three daughters before divorcing in 1935. Van Doren taught at Columbia from 1911 to 1930; he served as literary editor of the Nation (1919-1922) and the Century (1922-1925). His study, The American Novel (1920) became an influential text; an article on Cather he wrote for the Nation in 1921 was included in his Contemporary American Novelists (1922). Van Doren’s biography of Benjamin Franklin won a Pulitzer in 1939. Cather included him in invitations to tea at Bank Street and allowed him to use a chapter from The Song of the Lark in an anthology.

Place Annotations

New York, New York, United States

Work Annotations

Modern American Prose (1934) ; edited by Carl Van Doren

My Ántonia (1918) by Willa Cather

A Lost Lady (1923) by Willa Cather