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 |
There are many reasons why you have not heard from me for a long time: the War, which grows ever more complicated and discouraging; a gall bladder3 operation which, though not very complicated, is certainly discouraging, and the road to recovery is tedious and very boring - full of small disappointments in the matter of diet. Dr. Whipple4 did the operation in July, and since then we have had the worst summer that ever happened in New York2. The weather has been much more like that of Singapore5 than anything I have known before; intense heat with warm, steady rain day after day and night after night. A convalescence in such weather is naturally much retarded, and I haven't been able to make up a single pound of the eighteen I lost in the hospital. I am going to go up into the Berkshires6 for October, and I think I shall make a good recovery when I once get out of this air, which might be very pleasant for amphibious animals.
Cordially yours, Willa CatherInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1590.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1590
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Julian Street 1
- Date letter was written
- September 21, 1942
- 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
Cather struggled with illness throughout the spring of 1942, and her gall-bladder and appendix were removed on 24 July 1942 by Dr. Allen Whipple at the Presbyterian Hospital (#2375).
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.
Whipple, Allen Oldfather (1881-1963). American surgeon. Dr. Whipple was the surgeon-in-chief at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital from 1921 to 1946. He is famous for inventing the pancreatoduodenectomy (the Whipple procedure), an innovative surgical procedure for treating patients with pancreatic cancer.
Place Annotations
