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 |
Thank you1! Such a jolly letter and nice French-English. I love "in-eptness" to describe French politicians and all politicians!
Did you ever hear of a red wine Chateau Berliquet? A present from Bellow
Alfred Knopf3 from the Bellows4 stock. He also sent four bottles White Hermitage
1895; ought to be good.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1467.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1467
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Julian Street 1
- Date letter was written
- January 14 [1940]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The conjectured year relies on a penciled annotation on the letter likely made by Julian Street but possibly by an archivist.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Julian Street Papers (C0036), Princeton University, Firestone Library, Princeton, NJ
Individual Annotations
Long-established New York City wine merchant, Bellows Co.
Person Annotations
Street, Julian Leonard (1879-1947). American writer.
Born in Chicago, IL, Street graduated from Ridley College, a boys’
preparatory school located in St. Catharines, ON, Canada, in 1896. In 1899,
Street began reporting for the New York Mail and
Express and took charge of the dramatic department in 1900. The
same year, he married Ada Hilt, with whom he had two children and coauthored
Tide (1926), a novel published shortly after her
death. Street later married Marguerite Skibeness in 1930. Among his other
works are The Most Interesting American (1915), an
assessment of Theodore Roosevelt, The Country Cousin
(1917), a comedy coauthored with Booth Tarkington, and “Mr. Bisbee’s
Princess” (1925), a short story which won the O. Henry Award. Street was
also a well-known authority on food and wine. For New York City wine
merchant Bellows Co., he wrote an irregularly-published four-page pamphlet
on wine, which Cather read and which disposed her to strike up a
correspondence with him when he wrote asking her to autograph copies of her
books.
Knopf, Alfred A. (1892-1984). President of New York
publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Knopf received his BA from
Columbia University in New York City in 1912 and founded Alfred Knopf, Inc.,
in 1915 with his future wife Blanche Wolf. They married in 1916, and their
son Alfred “Pat” Knopf was born in 1918. Cather chose him as her publisher
beginning with Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920) and
One of Ours (1922), partly because she was
dissatisfied with the promotion of her books by Houghton Mifflin but also
because she recognized the high quality of Knopf's books, as well as what
she regarded as his intelligent advertising. Knopf was noted for publishing
the work of leading European and South American writers in translation, as
well as original works. Knopf and Cather’s extensive correspondence
testifies to their mutual professional respect and to what also became an
important personal friendship.
Place Annotations
