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 |
This3 is from the “Nation,”4 which seldom reviews and almost never praises a novel. I am very proud of it. I used to meet Phillip5 about the Waldorf and talk to him and I used to think “you big stuffed-shirt-and-checked-pants, I know more about the real west than you do, but I could never make anybody believe it, because I wear skirts and don’t shave.” But you see people do believe it6, after all, and I call that very jolly. Please show this notice to Roscoe7 and send it back to me.
WillieInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1894.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1894
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Elsie Cather1
- Date letter was written
- [late September or early October, 1913]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
This letter was likely sent with #1846, which contains internal references placing the letter in this date range.
- Place letter was written
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Susan J. and James Rosowski Cather Collection (MS228), University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, Archives & Special Collections, Lincoln, NE
Individual Annotations
The reviewer in the Nation favorably compares Cather's O Pioneers! to work by Frank Norris and David Graham Phillips: "The sureness of feeling and touch, the power without strain, which mark this book, lift it far above the ordinary product of contemporary novelists."
Person Annotations
Cather, Elsie Margaret (1890-1964) (“Bobbie”). Cather’s
sister. Born in Red Cloud, NE, shortly before Willa Cather
graduated from high school, Elsie attended the University of Nebraska in
Lincoln from 1908 to 1910, before transferring to Smith College, in
Northampton, MA, from which she graduated with an A.B. in English and Latin
in 1912. She undertook graduate study at the University of Nebraska in 1914
and in 1916 received her A.M. with a major in philosophy and a minor in
English. At both the undergraduate and the graduate level at Nebraska, she
studied under Louise Pound. She began a career in high school teaching in
1912, when she took a position in Lander, WY, where her brother Roscoe then
lived with his family. She also taught in Albuquerque, NM; Corning, IA;
Cleveland, OH; and briefly Red Cloud, when illness in the family brought her
home. Her longest tenure as a teacher was at Lincoln (NE) High School, where
she began teaching in 1920, with Olivia Pound and Mariel Gere as colleagues.
Willa Cather's expectation that Elsie be responsible for aging family and
friends and for legal affairs after their parents' deaths sometimes brought
the sisters into conflict. Elsie Cather retired from Lincoln High School in
1942. She died in Lincoln.
Phillips, David Graham (1867-1911). American journalist and novelist.
Indiana-born and a graduate of Princeton University, Phillips first
came to national prominence as a journalist in New York City, where he
worked for the New York Sun and the New York World and wrote exposés of the conditions in the slums of
the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His first novel, The
Great God Success (1901), about a young man from the Midwest who
climbs the ladder of success in the newspaper business while losing his
soul, appeared under a pseudonym because Joseph Pulitzer demanded exclusive
rights to the writings of all of his journalists. Phillips quit journalism
in 1902 and wrote twenty novels in nine years, while continuing to publish
magazine journalism. His exposé of political corruption, “The Treason of the
Senate,” was serialized in Cosmopolitan in 1906 and
led President Theodore Roosevelt to coin the phrase “The Man with a
Muck-Rake.” Phillips was shot dead near his New York City home by a man who
thought, erroneously, that one of his novels was a veiled attack on his
sister. Cather knew Phillips slightly during her years at McClure’s Magazine, and a review of O
Pioneers! (1913) in the Nation classed her
with Phillips as writing about “[t]he big spaces and big emotions of Western
life,” but Cather scoffed at him as a “big stuffed-shirt-and-checked-pants”
who did not really know the West (#1846).
Cather, Roscoe (1877-1945) (“Ross”). Cather’s brother.
Roscoe was born in Virginia, the second child and oldest son of
Charles and Virginia Cather. After graduating from Red Cloud (NE) High
School in 1895, he taught country school for two years, attended the
University of Nebraska in Lincoln for one year (1897-1898), taught high
school in Carlton, NE, and Oxford, NE, and finally became superintendent of
schools in Fullerton, NE. There he met fellow teacher Meta Schaper, whom he
married in 1907. They relocated to Lander, WY, in 1909, where he opened an
abstract office and where their three children, Virginia and twins Margaret
and Elizabeth, were born. In 1921, they moved to Casper, WY, where Roscoe
became president of the Wyoming Trust Company, and in 1937 to Colusa, CA,
where Roscoe and his brother Douglass had acquired a controlling interest in
the First Savings Bank of Colusa. Roscoe served as president of the bank
until his death. Willa visited Roscoe and his family in Wyoming several
times and shared important travel experiences with them, including a 1926
trip to New Mexico with Roscoe, Meta, and their children and a 1941 San
Francisco vacation with Roscoe and Meta. She also relied on him to handle
family-related business as well as personal financial matters, and he was
one of her chief correspondents throughout her life. Roscoe served as a
prototype for one of the twin brothers in the Templeton family in “Old Mrs.
Harris” (1932).
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
"[Untitled review of O Pioneers!]," Nation (September 4, 1913)
Nation
