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 |
Your letter3 is a great, great satisfaction to me. You are one of the very few people whom I would love to please, and whose disapprobation would be a heavy discouragement. I hope Mr. Winter4 can bring us together sometime, and I shall at any rate avail myself of your kind invitation to drop in upon you and Mrs. Garland5 at tea time. I am not up-town very often, however. I am always at home6 on Friday afternoons, and I would be so pleased and honored if you could drop in some Friday, after four. I am sure we would have a good many things to talk about. I am a fortunate writer to have interested you!
Cordially yours, Willa CatherInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1791.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1791
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Hamlin Garland 1
- Date letter was written
- December 27 [1921]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The conjectured year of this letter is based on a hypothesis about a sequence of letters. Cather is responding to a letter of Garland's dated December 12, which has been labeled in pencil as being from [1921]. Furthermore, the conjectured date of #1790, which seems to be next in sequence, is [January 5, 1922].
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- , University of Southern California, Doheny Memorial Library, Los Angeles, CA
Individual Annotations
On 12 December [1921], Garland wrote Cather about O Pioneers!, noting his long delay in reading it and praising Cather's spare prose style. He also noted that Edwin Winter was their mutual friend and sent greetings from his wife and an invitation to take tea with them.
5 Bank Street (New York City): The apartment Cather shared with Edith Lewis beginning in 1912, located in Greenwich Village in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Subway construction forced Cather and Lewis to relocate in 1927.
Person Annotations
Garland, Hamlin (1860-1940). American novelist. Hannibal
Hamlin Garland was born in Wisconsin and grew up on farms there and in Iowa;
many of his books were set in these locales. In 1884 Garland moved to
Boston, MA, and began writing. His short story collection Main-Travelled Roads (1890) was his first success, which he
followed with other works in a realistic vein. Garland moved to Chicago, IL,
in 1893, and in lectures and essays collected in Crumbling
Idols (1894) began calling for a new school of realistic American
fiction. In her journalism of the 1890s, Cather criticized Garland’s type of
fiction. Garland married Zulime Taft, sister of sculptor Lorado Taft, in
1899. Cather may have met Garland after he wrote her in 1919 praising O Pioneers!
Winter, Edwin W. (1845-1930). American railroad executive. After serving in an Illinois regiment during the Civil War, Winter joined the Union Pacific Railway Company in 1867 and worked for the railroads in varying capacities for the rest of his professional life. He was president of the Northern Pacific Railway Company from 1896 to 1897 and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company from 1903 to 1911. Winter wrote a complimentary letter to Cather after reading My Ántonia (1918) and visited her in 1919 to tell her how much he enjoyed the book. Willa Cather wrote to her brother Roscoe that she would “rather have the admiration of one man like” Winter “than sell a thousand books” (#2085).
Garland, Zulime Mauna Taft (1870-1942). American painter; wife of Hamlin Garland. Born in Illinois, daughter of Don Carlos Taft and Mary Foster Taft, and sister of sculptor Lorado Taft, Zulime Taft studied painting in Chicago, where she met writer Hamlin Garland. They married in 1899 in Washington, KS; their courtship was recounted in Hamlin Garland’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Daughter of the Middle Border (1921). They had two daughters, born in 1903 and 1907. The family lived in Chicago c. 1910, and then in New York City by 1920, then later in California. After the death of Hamlin Garland, Zulime lived in Los Angeles, CA, with her elder daughter. Although Cather and the Garlands exchanged invitations to tea, it is unclear how well they knew each other.
Place Annotations
