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 received your letter3 this morning and though I acknowledge it at once, I would like to have several days to think over the proposition made by the Reader's Book Club.
You see, I am not at all sure that I want my income increased in 1942 or
1943. The Government is cutting large stakes
steaks out of me this year. As I
figure it, the less money I have coming in, the more money I have for myself
and my own uses.! And certainly the publishers can
not be strongly tempted to accept the half of the sum offered, or even of the larger sum mentioned as possible, since
"My Antonia"4 quietly does her duty every
year by you and by me. Furthermore, I would be rather loathe to make any
outside-the-regular-trade arrangement, since I have turned down so many
propositions to omnibus it. I would especially hate to make any unorthodox
arrangement for Antonia, when I so firmly
refused to let Robert Morse Lovett5
use the book in the omnibus he made for you. He is a man whom I would have
liked to accommodate, and he seemed hurt when I refused his request for the
third time.
I can't myself quite see that even if the book went only to members of the Reader's Club, this arrangement would not more or less cut into the natural sale.
From the beginning Antonia has been advertised
only by its
her loving friends. I am sure that
if you will look into the total cost
amount the publishers have spent in
advertising Antonia over the period of
twenty-four years, you would find the expenditure very small. This is not a complaint. It is better to
have a book make its own way, if it
can!
Probably if the book were sold to the Reader's Book Club on the
⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ terms they offer, i.e., half
of the total payment going directly to the publishers, the publishers would
make a larger present profit, but I doubt if they would make a larger profit
in the long run. From the number of gins, and traps, and
suggested transformations, and
sweet persuasions, that have been
employed to sneak Antonia out of your
possession and mine, I should think that we might both conclude that she
was
is a fairly decent piece of
property to keep to ourselves. Perhaps I have always been a little
sentimental about the book, for the distressful stroke its youth had
suffered. Never a book that seems to have had "go" in it had so bad a
start.
Today, the 16th, the news looks pretty bad from all quarters. This morning when I read Churchill6's speach, I felt that even his enormous vitality had been a good deal bled out by the happenings of the last week7. Undset's8 new book9 about her escape and journey through Russia is very, very interesting, though I wish she could have been persuaded to call it simply, My Escape From Norway. She is a very extraordinary person, and one of the most mercilessly truthful people I have ever known.
Faithfully always, Willa CatherP.S. Tomorrow I am going to think solemnly over the Reader's Book Club proposition.
P.P.S. February 18thI have thought it over, and I am of the
same opinion still. Will that disappoint you very much? I hope [illegible] not.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1571.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1571
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, typewritten on recto of each leaf only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Ferris Greenslet1
- Date letter was written
- February 16, 1942
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Houghton Mifflin Company correspondence and records, 1832-1944 (MS AM 1925), Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA
Individual Annotations
On 14 February 1942, Greenslet wrote of a proposition from George Macy of the Readers Book Club to issue an edition of My Ántonia to its subscribers. The club's selection committee (Clifton Fadiman, Sinclair Lewis, Carl Van Doren, and Alexander Woollcott) proposed the edition. The club guaranteed a $5,000 minimum royalty (and perhaps up to $7500) to be divided between author and publisher, and suggested that sales of the novel in bookstores would not be harmed and, indeed, "word of mouth" from members might boost ordinary sales.
The U.S. and Britain both declared war on Japan in December 1941, after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. On 15 February 1942, Japan captured Singapore (a British colony), taking 60,000 prisoners.
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.
Lovett, Robert Morss (1870-1956). American writer, editor, educator, and government official. Born in Boston, MA, Robert Lovett graduated from Harvard University in 1892, and after a year teaching at Harvard began a long career teaching English and serving as an administrator at the University of Chicago. With W. V. Moody he wrote The History of English Literature (1902) and The First View of English Literature (1905). He served as editor of the Dial in 1917 and associate editor of the New Republic from 1921 to 1940. At Willa Cather’s suggestion, his October 1927 New Republic review of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) was excerpted on the dust jacket of the 1929 edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop. However, she refused permission to let Lovett use My Ántonia in an edited collection he put together for Houghton Mifflin. He served as government secretary of the U.S. Virgin Islands from 1939 to 1943, but was ousted after the Dies Committee charged him with being a communist subversive. He died in Chicago.
Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874-1965). British
politician and writer. Son of Lord Henry Randolph Spencer
Churchill and Jeannette Jerome Churchill, daughter of a New York financier,
Churchill had a long career in British diplomacy and politics, culminating
in his service as Prime Minister during World War II. Cather was
enthusiastic about Churchill's leadership during the war, following his
speeches, reading biographies of him, and attributing his shrewdness to his
American mother.
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.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
My Ántonia (1918) by Willa Cather
Return to the Future (1942) by Sigrid Undset
