Hendrik Van Loon (January 1, 1943) | Willa Cather Archive

#1608: Willa Cather to Hendrick Van Loon, January 1, 1943

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⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ January first 1943 Dear Hendrick Van Loon¹,

Your "Message of the Bells,"³ with its friendly personal message to me has given me great pleasure. In these days any friendly feeling that exists between people is more precious than it ever was before. People who think and feel alike reach out to touch one another. It reassures us to speak the names of those who will not and cannot believe that two thousand years, and the thousand that went before them can have gone for nothing. Pretty magnificent, Human History, when one looks back over it! This New Year's Day I feel glad to have lived in this world and to know a little of its history. And I believe, as you do, that even now all is not lost. Much is lost forever, but not all.

Gratefully yours Willa Cather

Information about this letter:

Source File:: cat.let1608.xml
Letter identifier: 1608
Contents: Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso.
Person to whom letter was written: Hendrik Van Loon ¹
Date letter was written: January 1, 1943
Place letter was written: New York, New York, United States²
Location of original letter: Henrick Willem van Loon Papers, 1882-1944, Cornell University, Carl A. Kroch Library, Ithaca, NY

Person Annotations

1275

Van Loon, Hendrik Willem (1882-1944). Dutch-American author and illustrator. Born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Hendrik Van Loon attended the Noorthey Institutue and emigrated to the U.S. in 1902 to study at Cornell University. Van Loon first worked as a journalist for the Associated Press. After earning his PhD from the University of Munich in 1911, he wrote his first book, The Fall of the Dutch Republic (1913). Naturalized as an American citizen in 1919, Van Loon briefly taught at Cornell, served as head of the Department of Social Sciences at Antioch College from 1921 to 1922, and was an associate editor of the Baltimore Sun from 1923 to 1924. Van Loon won the first Newbery Medal for The Story of Mankind (1921) and also wrote The Short History of Discovery (1917), Ancient Man (1920), and Tolerance (1925). Willa Cather wrote Van Loon in 1943 that The Story of the Bible (1923) gave her “great pleasure” (#1608). Van Loon contributed to the Dutch resistance during WWII and was later knighted by Queen Wihelmina.

Place Annotations

New York, New York, United States

Work Annotations

Message of the Bells, The, or, What Happened to Us on Christmas Eve (1942), by Hendrick Van Loon