Guide to Reading Letter Transcriptions
Some of these features are only visible when "plain text" is off.
| 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 |
Thank you for your letter bearing good wishes, and may I send you all possible good wishes for the coming year?
I have been a long time in replying to your letter3 of December 4th. I have thought your proposition over carefully and I am still, as I was when I first read your letter, strongly against any plan to make an illustrated edition of ANTONIA4 for next year, or for any other year.
Certainly, I like Grant Wood's5 work, but his whole view of the West, and his experience of it, is very different from my own. Our geographical background was different. Iowa6 is a black-loam and heavy-clay state: too much rain and plenty of mud. In Central and Western Nebraska7 the soil is sandy and light, not nearly so productive as in Iowa,- that is why the farms were so much further apart. Settlers in Nebraska were seventy per cent from overseas. Foreign population in Iowa was much smaller - though there were a good many Czechs there.
Why can't we let ANTONIA alone? She has gone her own way quietly and with some
dignity, and neither you nor I have reason to complain of her behavior. She wasn't
played up in the first place, and surely a coming-out party, after twenty years,
would be a little funny. I think it would be all wrong to dress her up and publish
push her. We have saved her from text books8, from dismemberment, from
omnibuses, and now let us save her from
⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ colored illustrations. I like her
just as she is.
I would, of course, be pleased if I could feel sure that the Benda9 illustrations will never be ripped out10 again, and I would be greatly
gratified if one of the excellent proof-readers at the Riverside Press would run
through the book and mark the broken letters and illegible words which should be
replaced. In case you should ever decide to reset the book, I beg you to use just
the same type and the same slightly tinted paper.( now used.
By the way, I think very well of a book you have recently published, but I would not
dare tell you which, lest one of your enterprising young men11
would
should manage to work my name into an
advertisement.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1385.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1385
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, typewritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Ferris Greenslet1
- Date letter was written
- [December 29, 1937]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
Greenslet's January 3, 1938, response to this letter suggests Cather mistakenly dated it January 29, 1937, rather than December 29.
- 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
Greenslet's letter of 4 Deceber 1937, which describes his proposal concerning an illustrated edition of My Ántonia, has not been located.
See #1144, a letter to Greenslet describing a proposed condensation of My Ántonia for a school edition.
The Benda illustrations were dropped for a time in 1930 (see #1028).
The staff of Houghton Mifflin's publicity department.
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.
Wood, Grant (1891-1942). American artist. Born in Anamosa, IA, Grant Wood attended the Minneapolis School of Design and Handicraft in 1910 and afterwards made jewelry and metalwork. In 1923 he studied painting at the Académie Julian in Paris and was influenced by a 1928 trip to Germany, developing the style that became emblematic of the Midwestern regionalist movement in the visual arts in the 1930s. Wood gained international acclaim when American Gothic (1930) was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1932 he co-founded the Stone City Colony and Art School and in 1934 became a professor at the University of Iowa. Willa Cather respected Wood’s work but rejected a 1937 proposition from Houghton Mifflin that Wood be commissioned to illustrate My Ántonia (1918).
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.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
My Ántonia (1918) by Willa Cather
