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 |
In writing to you yesterday I forgot to ask you whether it would bee be too much trouble for you to send me my Webster Dictionary3 by freight or express?
Formerly, when I was at the office4
every day I used the dictionaries there, but now that I do most of my work at home5 I need one very badly. you have
another Webster at home besides mine, I think, and would not miss it. It is the
Dictionary Charley Moore6 gave me, you
remember, and I think you rescued it from the fire the time the Moore offices burned7.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1880.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1880
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Charles F. Cather1
- Date letter was written
- April 18 [1913]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
Internal evidence suggests that this letter was written shortly after #1879, and therefore was most likely written in 1913.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Philip L. and Helen Cather Southwick Collection (MS077), University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, Archives & Special Collections, Lincoln, NE
Individual Annotations
The office of McClure's Magazine.
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.
The offices of the Security Investment Company at 11th and O Streets in Lincoln, Nebraska, burned in 1904.
Person Annotations
Cather, Charles Fectigue (1848-1928). Cather’s father.
Charles Fectigue (possibly Fectique) Cather was born in the Back
Creek Valley of Virginia, north of Winchester. His family were sheep raisers
who were largely, but not entirely, Union supporters during the Civil War.
He married Mary Virginia Seibert Boak, daughter of Confederate supporters,
in 1872. In 1883 he and his family followed his parents, William and
Caroline Cather, and brother George to Webster County in Nebraska, where
various cousins and uncles had also settled. Initially he ran a ranch in the
county but soon moved his family into the town of Red Cloud, where he had an
insurance and real estate business. Four of his children, Willa, Roscoe,
Charles, and Jessica, were born in Virginia, while three, James, Elsie, and
John, were born in Nebraska. Cather’s relationship with her father was very
warm: she made regular visits to her parents in Red Cloud and especially
enjoyed her father’s letters expressing appreciation of her novels. A week
after she concluded a visit to her ailing father in Red Cloud, he died of
heart disease. He served as the prototype for Hillary Templeton in “Old Mrs.
Harris” (1932).
Moore, Charles H. (1862-1933) (“Charley”). Lincoln businessman. Born and educated in Illinois, Charles H. Moore came to Lincoln, NE, in 1883 to work for his uncles Robert E. Moore, Thomas W. Moore, and John H. Moore, partners in the Security Investment Company; he retired from the company as secretary-treasurer in 1928. He married in 1905. While Cather was at the University of Nebraska in the early 1890s, she knew Charles Moore through his uncle, John Moore, who had lived in Red Cloud, NE, in the 1880s, and through her father, Charles F. Cather, who worked for the Moores’ company in the 1890s. Charles Moore gave Willa Cather a dictionary and a snake ring, both of which she kept for many years. One of Moore’s nieces said he once showed her a packet of letters from Willa Cather, but they were not found among his papers after his death.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Webster's Dictionary
