J. John Munson (May 22, 1934) | Willa Cather Archive

#1820: Willa Cather to J. John Munson, May 22, 1934

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452 East 52nd.St. New York City² May 22nd.'34 Dear Mr Munson¹;

I am terribly to have placed you to any inconvenience but I have only this very moment located your first letter³ described in your card denouncing me for not having answered your queries immediately,but I have been on the go every moment for the past few months doing some work for a Calif.⁴ movie studio,my friends are all deserting me for my neglect in them,correspondence is piled in hugh stacks on my desk and my secty⁵ is away and I am forced to attend to my own mail which I find most distasteful,but your letter seemed sufficiently urgent to warrant my answering you.

"My Antonia"⁶,in my opinion is by far the best of all my contributions to an extremely poor literary era,it took me approximately 2 years of constant working to complete it before offering the manuscript to my publisher⁷,there was no real reason for writing it beyond the fact that I wanted to pile up as much coin of the realm as possible while I was young enough to enjoy it,I believe this is the appttitude taken by most of our so called literary lights of today tho,I seriously doubt if a single one of them would ever agree with me,in print that is,there is really nothing else I can tell you about this book,there have been innumerable long and short criticisms done about it possibly you will be able to gather some meat from a few of those.

If there are any more points I can enlighten you upon do not hesitate to call upon me and I will try to the best of my ability to answer you.

Sincerely yours Willa Cather

Information about this letter:

Source File:: cat.let1820.xml
Letter identifier: 1820
Contents: Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
Person to whom letter was written: J. John Munson¹
Date letter was written: May 22, 1934
Place letter was written: New York, New York, United States²
Location of original letter: Willa Cather Collection (Adams 153.1), Drew University Library, Special Collections and Archives, Madison, NJ

Individual Annotations

On 25 May 1934, Sarah Bloom wrote to J. Florence Rubin at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., asking the Knopf offices to answer Munson's query (#3298). Bloom enclosed a proposed draft letter for the publisher to use. These circumstances suggest that Cather decided not to send this letter.

My Ántonia was published by Houghton Mifflin Co. on 21 September 1918.

Person Annotations

0236

Munson, J. John. In the 1930s, a man using the name J. John Munson (and sometimes John J. Munson) and claiming professorial appointments at various New York City colleges and universities wrote to many authors soliciting information about their works and claiming this information would be used in a book about the craft of a particular literary genre. Munson (if that was actually his name) was not a professor and never published a book. Instead, he seems to have been using this ruse to secure interesting autograph letters. Munson evidently wrote to Cather in 1934 about My Ántonia (1918). She had her secretary Sarah Bloom pass the inquiry off to the office staff of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., but also composed a letter to him, full of hyperbole and fabrications, which she evidently did not send.

0102

Bloom, Sarah J. (1889-1961). Cather's personal secretary. Born in New York in 1889 to Russian immigrants Solomon and Bertha Bloom, Sarah J. Bloom worked for Cather from some time in the 1920s until Cather's death and continued to work for Edith Lewis on matters pertaining to Cather's literary estate thereafter. Bloom typed Cather's literary manuscripts and managed Cather's correspondence, typing dictated letters and sometimes responding for Cather when she was traveling. Bloom’s work for Cather supplemented full-time office employment in New York City (for many years she worked for the New York State Public Service Commission). She thus came to Cather and Lewis's apartment on weekends to take dictation, pick up and deliver typescripts, and deliver typed letters for signature. She died in New York city in 1961.

Place Annotations

New York, New York, United States

California, United States

Work Annotations

My Ántonia (1918), by Willa Cather