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 |
SEP 13 1934 AM September 10 My Dear Blanche1;
I was delighted to have a letter from you, from Nevada3! And I am so glad that you have at last met the Ehrmans4. They have the old Western tradition, more than any other people I know—they grew up in it, and have kept it. Not very ancient themselves, they have the large and generous ways of the "Lost Lady"5 period, and they always remind me of the railroad aristocracy which was the splendour of my childhood. And San Francisco6 itself has a little of that atmosphere, which has disappeared everywhere else.
I’ve had a perfect summer—feel as if I’d had a new coat of paint.
Devotedly Willa CatherInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1235.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1235
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Blanche Wolf Knopf1
- Date letter was written
- September 10 [1934]
- Place letter was written
- Jaffrey, New Hampshire, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., Records (MS-00062), University of Texas, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, TX
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.
Ehrman, Florence Hellman (1882-1964). San Francisco philanthropist. Born in California, a daughter of banker Isaias Hellman and his wife, Esther Neugass Hellman, Florence Hellman married one of her father’s lawyers, Sidney M. Ehrman in 1904; they had two children, Sidney H. Ehrman and Esther H. Ehrman. Cather had dinner at the Ehrman house in San Francisco in 1931, when she came to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of California in Berkeley, of which Sidney Ehrman was a regent. She compared the Ehrmans to the old railroad aristocracy of her childhood.
0826Ehrman, Sidney Myer (1873-1975). American attorney and philanthropist. Born in the California, Sidney Ehrman married Florence Hellman, daughter of one of the most important business lawyers in California, in 1904; they had two children, Sidney H. Ehrman and Esther H. Ehrman. Sidney Ehrman met the Menuhin family in San Francisco in the early twentieth century and funded Yehudi Menuhin’s studies in New York and in Paris in 1925 and 1926 and bought his first full-size concert violin, a 1695 Grancino. Sidney Ehrman, appointed a regent of the University of California in 1930, met Cather when she received an honorary doctorate from the university in 1931.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
A Lost Lady (1923) by Willa Cather
