Mabel Beeson Wyeth (April 28, 1943)

#1627: Willa Cather to Mabel Beeson Wyeth, April 28, 1943

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Textual Feature	Appearance
passage deleted with a strikethrough mark	~~deleted passage~~
passage deleted by overwritten added letters	~~overwritten passage~~
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

⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ April 28, 1943. My dear Mrs. Wyeth¹:

I do appreciate your cordial and friendly letter and I wish I could tell you to send your books right along to me. But the handling, wrapping and unwrapping of books, weighing them and getting them to the post office is really quite a burden. And if I undertook to do it for all the friendly people who make that request, it would make very serious inroads on my time. Two years ago (December 1940) I sprained the tendon in my right thumb by autographing five hundred copies of a special limited edition de luxe of "Sapphira and the Slave Girl"³. It took me probably four hours to autograph the books, but it took Doctor Ober⁴, that fine orthopaedist of Marlborough Street, Boston⁵, a year to put my right hand in such a condition that I could write again. Since then I have been very careful of that hand. I can do this for you, however. I can autograph for you three pages torn from a "dummy"⁶ of Sapphira, and you can insert them in any book you choose. That I will do tonight.

Very cordially yours, Willa Cather

Information about this letter:

Source File:: cat.let1627.xml
Letter identifier: 1627
Contents: Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
Person to whom letter was written: Mabel Beeson Wyeth ¹
Date letter was written: April 28, 1943
Place letter was written: New York, New York, United States²
Location of original letter: , Lincoln City Libraries, Jane Pope Geske Heritage Room of Nebraska Authors, Lincoln, NE

Individual Annotations

A mockup or sample of a book a publisher used for design and marketing purposes. A dummy typically included a draft cover and a small number of printed pages of the text, the rest of the volume being filled out with blank paper.

Person Annotations

2004

Wyeth, Mabel Russell Beeson (1879-1958). Civic activist. Born in Vincennes, IN, daughter of Dr. William Henry Harrison Beeson and Mary Hall Beeson, Mabel Beeson married Dr. George Austin Wyeth in New York City in 1906; they had three children. Active in Republican politics, she was a charter member of the Women’s National Republican Club of New York City in 1923 and served as its president and on the board of governors in the 1930s. Mabel Wyeth was also active in the YWCA and on the fundraising committee of the Negro College Fund. After her husband retired, they moved to Washington, D.C., to be near two of their children; she died there and was buried in St. Louis, MO. In 1943 Mabel Wyeth asked Cather to autograph some books for her; instead, Cather offered to send her signed pages from a dummy of Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940).

0136

Ober, Frank (1881-1960). Boston Orthopedic surgeon. Born in Mt. Desert, ME, Ober graduated from Tufts Medical School in Boston, MA, in 1905. He volunteered for service overseas in 1917 and spent two years as head of the orthopedic section of the U.S. Army Base Hospital No. 5 in France. On his return he rose from junior member of the visiting staff to chief orthopedic surgeon at Children’s Hospital in Boston and served as a clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard Medical School. About once a month he traveled to Philadelphia, PA, and New York City to see patients in consultation. In 1941, Cather was referred to Ober for her troubles with her right hand, and he prescribed and had constructed for her a metal and leather splint for her forearm and hand.

Place Annotations

New York, New York, United States

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Work Annotations

Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), by Willa Cather