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 |
I’m so sorry not to be able to dine with you tonight. I was in the Park yesterday when the weather suddenly changed, and though I taxid swiftly home I got a sort of chill and lost my voice again. I’ve called off everything else for this week.
Next week is full until Thursday. I suppose you saw the interesting letter4 on me and Lewis5 in the Saturday Review6? Whoever7 the lady8 is, she took a lot of trouble9, I must say!
I forgot to tell you how much I’ve liked all the ads in the Times10 book section. I think the
one11 on the Borzoi books for the seaon
season, which appeared several weeks ago, was the
handsomest book advertisement I ever saw. I’ve heard dozens of people speak of
it.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1313.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1313
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Blanche Wolf Knopf1
- Date letter was written
- [October 25, 1922]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The conjectured date of this letter is derived from the inference that Cather is referencing a letter published Saturday 21 October 1922 in the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post.
- 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
5 Bank Street (New York City): The apartment Cather shared with Edith Lewis beginning in 1912, located in Greenwich Village in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Subway construction forced Cather and Lewis to relocate in 1927.
See #0622 on the identity of the letter writer.
Ponsonby critiqued Sinclair Lewis's review of One of Ours in the Literary Review on the grounds that he approached the novel from his own worldview and failed to appreciate the novel on Cather's own terms.
The Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., advertisement under the heading "History of a Publishing
Season" that appeared in the New York Times on 8 October 1922. The ad begins by touting the 4th printing of One of Ours and features the 1921 Rinehart Marsden studio portrait of Cather.
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.
Lewis, Sinclair (1885-1951). American novelist. Born
in Sauke Centre, MN, Sinclair Lewis graduated from Yale University in 1908.
Although he published short stories and several novels in the teens, he
achieved critical and popular success with Main
Street (1920), which satirized Midwestern provincialism. On a 1921
lecture tour, he regularly praised Cather’s work. He continued with a string
of popular and critical successes, including Babbitt
(1922), Arrowsmith (1925) (for which he declined the
Pulitzer Prize for fiction), Mantrap (1926), and Elmer Gantry (1927). Even though he depicted One of Ours (1922) as a failure in his New York Evening Post review, Cather invited him to
tea and said she was not “a particle sore at him” (#0624). Although they
infrequently saw each other in person, they remained on good terms, and when
Lewis was the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature,
he praised Cather in his acceptance speech. Lewis was married and divorced
twice, first to Grace Livingston Hegger and then to Dorothy Thompson. Later,
he lived with Rosemary Marcella Powers, whom Cather met. Lewis’s later
career was marred by his alcoholism, which led to his death in Rome,
Italy.
Canby, Marion Ponsonby Gause (1885-1974). American poet. Marion Ponsonby Gause was born in Wilmington, DE, and was educated at a private school. She married Henry Seidel Canby in 1907; they had two sons. She published two volumes of poetry, High Mowings (1932) and On My Way (1937). Cather probably met the Canbys in the early 1920s; her extant correspondence with them, together and individually, began in 1922.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
"Correspondence: Across a Chasm," New York Evening Post, The Literary Review (October 21, 1922), by Marion Ponsonby
Literary Review of the New York Evening Post
New York Times Book Review
