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 got home2 from abroad very late and have been terribly hard driven—by affairs not at all my own, mostly. But I snatch a moment to get the check4 for Mr. McClure5 off to you—I've meant to send it a dozen times.
I had a lovely summer in Italy6.
Affectionately Willa CatherInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1777.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1777
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Ida Tarbell 1
- Date letter was written
- [November to December 1935]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
Cather's only trip to Europe after moving to 570 Park Avenue in December 1932 was in 1935. The conjectured date range encompasses the two months after she returned in late October 1935.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- The Ida M. Tarbell Collection, Allegheny College, Pelletier Library, Meadville, PA
Individual Annotations
570 Park Avenue (New York City): The apartment Cather shared with Edith Lewis from December 11, 1932, until her death, located in the Manhattan borough of New York City, near Central Park. They had apartment 7D. Lewis continued to live there until her own death.
Tarbell organized a subscription for financial support of S.S. McClure (see #1210).
Person Annotations
Tarbell, Ida Minerva (1875-1944). American “muckraking” journalist
and biographer. Ida Tarbell was born on a farm in Erie County,
PA. When her father entered the oil business the family moved to the rough
Pennsylvania oil region city of Rouseville for several years before settling
in Titusville. Tarbell graduated from Alleghany College in 1880 and briefly
taught in Ohio before earning an MA from Alleghany and going to work for the
Chautaquan magazine. After three years editing
and writing for the magazine, she spent three years in Paris, France,
studying history at the Sorbonne. On her 1893 return to the U.S., she was
hired by McClure’s to write a biography of Napoleon
Bonaparte, then moving on to Abraham Lincoln as a subject, about whom she
would write periodically for decades. She is best known for her next work
for McClure’s, The History of the
Standard Oil Company (serialized 1902-1904). Conflicts with S. S.
McClure led her to depart McClure’s in 1906 with
fellow writers Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker to found the
competing American Magazine, where she worked until
1915. Thereafter, she made her living as a free-lance writer. When Cather
arrived at McClure’s in spring 1906, Tarbell was
still working there. Despite Tarbell’s imminent planned departure, the two
women became friendly enough that Tarbell invited Cather to visit the farm
she had recently bought in Connecticut and where her mother and sister lived
with her. It is not clear how frequently Cather and Tarbell saw each other
in subsequent years but they kept in touch, and Cather contributed to
Tarbell’s efforts to support S. S. McClure financially. Tarbell died in
Bridgeport, CT, and is buried in Titusville.
McClure, Samuel Sidney (1857-1949) (“S.S.”). Irish-born
American publisher. McClure immigrated to the U.S. at age nine,
living with his family in Indiana. Despite poverty and the limited education
he had received in Ireland, he graduated from high school and then Knox
College in Illinois. He then moved to Boston, MA, where from 1882 to 1884 he
edited the Wheelman, a bicycling magazine. Despite
opposition from her parents, he married his Knox College classmate Harriet
Hurd in 1883. The couple had four biological children (Eleanor, Bess, Mary,
and Robert), and adopted one (Enrico). In 1884, S.S. started McClure’s
Syndicate, which placed fiction in newspapers across the country. In 1893
with his college classmate John Sanborn Phillips he started McClure's Magazine, which was best-known for the
"muckraking" exposés by writers such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens,
but which also published literature. After his cousin H.H. McClure, who
worked for the McClure Syndicate, brought Cather to S.S. McClure’s
attention, McClure, Phillips & Co. brought out Cather’s first book of
fiction, The Troll Garden (1905). When most of the
editorial staff, including Steffens and Tarbell, resigned from McClure’s in 1906, he hired Cather as an editor; she
later became managing editor. After she left her position at McClure’s in 1912 and when S. S. McClure had lost
control of the magazine still bearing his name, Cather ghost wrote his
autobiography (McClure’s serial 1913-1914, book
publication 1914). McClure made repeated—and ultimately
failed—attempts to reestablish himself in journalism and magazine
publishing, often trying to enlist Cather in these enterprises. She almost
went with him to Europe in 1915 to report on the war for the Evening Mail, and she remained personally loyal to
her mercurial and often-irresponsible former employer. He served as the
prototype for Marcus O’Mally, editor of the Outcry,
in her story “Ardessa” (1918), and it has been suggested that Cather modeled
the courtship and marriage between Myra and Oswald Henshaw in My Mortal Enemy (1926) on that of the McClures.
Place Annotations
