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 |
NORTHEAST HARBOR 2
MAINE August 16, 1946 My dear Elsie1:
I wrote you a hasty note to tell you that I could never be persuaded to submit to
a
"Portable Cather"4 published by
Viking. These "Portables" seem to be the last derivative of the torrent of
anthologies which very nearly wiped out all the dignity and nearly all the profits
of the legitimate publishing business. After the war everybody wants to "get by" easy; schools, teachers and pupils. Nobody wants to toil through "For Whom the Bell Tolls"5 when they can read the worst
chapters of the book and say "Hemeningway6? Oh, yes, sure!"
Why are you (telling me that you are working on a new book in which you are very much
interested) willing to squander your time and scatter your attention for a miserable
collection which means to get by as a "Portable" when other forms of the Anthology
have become a little stale.??? Such a waste of energy!!
I think Alfred Knopf7 is still in England8 but I am quite sure that he would not have any dealings9 with a "Portable" when his entire list of any writer's books are selling steadily all the time.
So let me wish you happy days and good luck on your new book and ask you to forget this insidious "Portable" suggestion.
Yours Willa CatherInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1736.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1736
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant 1
- Date letter was written
- August 16, 1946
- Place letter was written
- Northeast Harbor, Maine, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Literary and Historical Manuscripts (MA 1602 (73)), Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY
Individual Annotations
Asticou Inn (Northeast Harbor, ME): Originally built in 1883 by A. C. Savage, the Asticou Inn was destroyed by a fire in 1899, but rebuilt by 1901. When the war and health considerations made travel to Grand Manan impossible, Willa Cather and Edith Lewis stayed at the Asticou in the 1940s, occupying a small cottage on the grounds of the inn.
Alexander Woollcott inauguarated the Viking Portable series in 1943. The first volume, As You Were, was a compilation of soldiers' writings, but the second volume presented a selection of John Steinbeck's writings, and the series became known for such author compilations.
Knopf wrote Cather on 21 August 1946 indicating he had been approached about creating a "Portable Willa Cather" for Viking and that he is against it and presumes Cather will be too (aee #2746).
Person Annotations
Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley (1881-1965). American journalist and
author. Born and raised in Winchester, MA, a suburb of Boston,
Elizabeth Sergeant graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1903. In 1910,
Pauline Goldmark sent her to Cather at McClure’s
Magazine with a proposed article, published as “Toilers of the
Tenements,” and Cather and Sergeant became lifelong friends. In 1914
Sergeant became one of the original contributors to the New Republic. While on assignment in France in 1917 she was
injured by a land mine; her injury and recuperation were the subject of Shadow-Shapes: Journal of a Wounded Woman (1920). She
moved to New Mexico in 1920 and became involved with the Taos artists colony
and advocated for Native American rights, but her work frequently took her
back to New York City. She included Cather in her collection of portraits of
prominent Americans, Fire under the Andes (1927).
Sergeant studied with Carl Jung and Toni Woolf in Zurich, Switzerland, from
1929 to 1931. When she returned to the U.S. she sold her house in New Mexico
and settled in New York City, writing many magazine articles about authors
and psychological topics. She later moved to Rockland County, NY. Cather’s
letters to Sergeant comment frequently on both her own and Sergeant’s
writing and testify to a strong and lively friendship maintained despite
Sergeant's being a committed reformer and far to the left of Cather
politically and culturally. Sergeant’s Willa Cather: A
Memoir (1953) includes extensive paraphrases of Cather’s letters to
her.
Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961). American novelist. A member of
the Lost Generation of expatriate American artists who lived in France after
World War I, Ernest Hemingway is known for his stripped-down prose style and
his depictions of the war and its aftermath. Over the course of his career,
he published seven novels, six short story collections, and two works of
nonfiction. In a widely-quoted private letter to critic Edmund Wilson in
1923, Hemingway dismissed One of Ours (1922) because
Cather had no first-hand experience of the battlefield, while he served as
an ambulance driver, which influenced his accounts of the war. There is no
evidence that the two authors ever met, but Cather’s passing mentions of
Hemingway in her letters suggest she read his works and followed the
development of his career. After Cather's death, Hemingway went on to win
the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 (which Cather won in 1923) and the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
Knopf, Alfred A. (1892-1984). President of New York
publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Knopf received his BA from
Columbia University in New York City in 1912 and founded Alfred Knopf, Inc.,
in 1915 with his future wife Blanche Wolf. They married in 1916, and their
son Alfred “Pat” Knopf was born in 1918. Cather chose him as her publisher
beginning with Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920) and
One of Ours (1922), partly because she was
dissatisfied with the promotion of her books by Houghton Mifflin but also
because she recognized the high quality of Knopf's books, as well as what
she regarded as his intelligent advertising. Knopf was noted for publishing
the work of leading European and South American writers in translation, as
well as original works. Knopf and Cather’s extensive correspondence
testifies to their mutual professional respect and to what also became an
important personal friendship.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
For Whom The Bell Tolls (October 21, 1940) by Ernest Hemingway
