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 |
It would make me very happy if you could dine with us5 here at seven oclock on Saturday, the twenty-second. I want to hear about your summer, and what you think of our Christian brotherhood with6 Stalin7.
Yours Faithfully Willa Cather Mme. Sigrid Undset1 Hotel Margaret Orange Street Brooklyn 3 New York NEW YORK. N.Y.2 NOV 17 1941 430 PMInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1557.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1557
- Contents
- Document is one leaf handwritten on recto only. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Sigrid Undset1
- Date letter was written
- November 17 [1941]
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Brevsamling 348, National Library of Norway, Oslo Division
Individual Annotations
570 Park Avenue (New York City): The apartment Cather shared with Edith Lewis from December 11, 1932, until her death, located in the Manhattan borough of New York City, near Central Park. They had apartment 7D. Lewis continued to live there until her own death.
In a 6 November 1941 radio address, Stalin proclaimed that Germany's "crazy plan" to unite the United States and Great Britain against the Soviet Union had failed, and a coalition between the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union against Germany was "now a reality."
Person Annotations
Undset, Sigrid (1882-1949). Norwegian novelist. Undset is
best known for her historical novels set in medieval Norway, the Kristin Lavrandsdatter trilogy (1920-22), set in the
fourteenth-century, The Master of Hestvikin tetralogy
(1925-27), set in the thirteenth century. Early in her career she wrote
realistic novels set in contemporary Norway, including Jenny (1911) about a woman painter. She was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1928 and continued to publish novels, set both in
contemporary and historical Norway, that reflected her conversion to
Catholicism. Undset persuaded her Norwegian publisher to issue her sister
Signe Undset Thomas’s translation of Lucy Gayheart
(1935) (the only Norwegian translation of Cather’s work to appear before her
death). A strong critic of the German Reich, Undset made a dramatic escape
from Norway over the arduous land route when the Nazis invaded Norway in
April 1940, events she later described in Return to the
Future (1942). When Undset reached New York City in the fall of
1940, Alfred Knopf, Cather and Undset’s mutual publisher, arranged their
first meeting. They had long been enthusiastic readers of each other’s
novels and were evidently established correspondents, although their extant
correspondence begins in 1940. During her exile Undset settled in a
residential hotel in Brooklyn Heights, and she and Cather saw each other
socially. Cather praised her as “just all a great woman should be - and on a
giant scale” (#1541). Undset was an active public critic of the Nazis during
her exile. She returned to Norway at the close of the war in 1945 and died
there.
Lewis, Edith Labaree (1881-1972). Magazine editor,
advertising copywriter, and Cather's domestic partner. Born in
Lincoln, NE, to Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Edith Lewis
attended the preparatory school associated with the University of Nebraska,
earning college credits from the University before transferring to Smith
College in Northampton, MA, in 1899. She received an A.B. in English from
Smith in 1902 and returned home to teach elementary school. She met Willa
Cather in the summer of 1903 at the home of Sarah Harris, publisher of the
Lincoln Courier. Moving to New York City soon
afterward, Lewis settled into a studio on Washington Square and found work
at the Century Publishing Company. Cather was her guest when she visited the
city from Pittsburgh. In 1906, at Cather's suggestion, Lewis applied for a
position as an editorial proofreader at McClure's
Magazine, and the two women worked together on the McClure's staff for six years. In 1908, they moved
into a shared apartment at 82 Washington Place, and then, in 1912, to Five
Bank Street. Lewis left McClure's in 1915 to become
managing editor of Every Week Magazine, where she
stayed until the magazine folded in 1918. In 1919 she began a long career as
an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Co. In 1926 Edith Lewis
acquired the land on which she and Cather built their cottage on Grand Manan
Island. When they lost their apartment on Bank Street to subway construction
in 1927, they shared quarters at the Grosvenor Hotel when they were both in
New York City. In 1932 they took an apartment at 570 Park Avenue. Throughout
their relationship, Lewis was closely involved in Cather's creative process,
reading and editing her work in pre-publication forms. Cather's will
appointed Lewis as executor of her literary estate and a beneficiary of her
literary trust. Lewis authorized E.K. Brown as Cather's first biographer and
published her own memoir of Cather, Willa Cather
Living (1953). She remained in their Park Avenue apartment after
Cather's death and died there after a long period of illness and invalidism.
She is buried at Cather's side in Jaffrey, NH.
Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) Dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Joseph Stalin was born Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili to a poor family in Sakartvelo, Transcaucasia, a country on the eastern end of the Black Sea. After Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin took leadership of the Communist party. He collectivized Soviet agriculture, and farmers and those who resisted were executed or sent to the Gulag system of labor camps. His forced collectivization led to a famine that killed millions of Soviet Union citizens. By some estimates, Stalin killed nearly 20 million people during his rule.
Place Annotations
