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 sent you a check3 yesterday, and today I have your nice letter written Sunday; such a cheerful pleasant letter that I feel I must get a few words off to you. One reason why I have been so busy and harassed for the last six months is, that Houghton Mifflin are getting out a complete uniform edition4 of all my books, beautifully designed by Bruce Rogers5, who has for many years been recognized as the leading designer in this country6 and in England7. (He has just left New York2 for England, where he is to design and execute the great Oxford Bible8.) The autographed edition is limited to 770 sets9, each set containing twelve books, to be sold at $10 a volume, and sold in sets only. There will also be a cheaper library edition10 of about 750 sets, to be sold at $3.50 per volume, and an English edition of 1,000 sets.
Alfred Knopf11 has no subscription department at all, and this is done with his agreement and by his advice. All the old books were full of frightful errors of taste on my part, and many errors on the part of the proof readers. (Of course, all future books will be published by Knopf first, then added to the subscription edition at the same cost per volume.) There is not a great deal of money in it for either Alfred or me, and I held the proposition off for two years, but Alfred Knopf thought I had better get it done and over. The correspondence and detail attending this job have given me an uninteresting and profitless winter. It is still hanging on, and I will not be really through with it before the first of August. That is the chief reason why I cannot go to Red Cloud12 this summer, much as I would love to go.
I have had to cut out a great many pleasant things besides cutting out a visit to you and to Red Cloud. I am enclosing an invitation13 from the Carnegie Corporation, which I had to refuse because I really feel too tired to take a trip of that kind. I would have to meet a great many people, and you know that always tires me. I urged Mr. Keppel14, who is a very charming person, to send Thornton Wilder15 in my stead. He asked Wilder, and Wilder accepted. He will do us credit. He speaks beautiful French and Italian, and he is a gentleman and a scholar. Besides, he loves being in crowds of people. Of course, this is rather a secret. I hope Wilder thinks he was the first choice, but I would like you to know that I had such an invitation, and I would like Carrie16 and Mary17 to know.
Your letter is full of so many cheerful things, that I wish I could answer it more
fully. Oh, I do hope it won't be hot, and that you will have one more summer in the
dear little town we used to know.! If you don't go travelling, I hope you
will use my check to have some good woman come in to do the housework for you. It
is
awfully foolish for you to do it yourself.
I will write you about the various nieces when I have more time. I really am very well pleased with all the nieces I know "personally". Please tell Mary Creighton that nothing that has happened to me this winter (and some nice things have happened) has given me any more pleasure than her two lovely letters. They seemed, somehow, so full of things and people I remember. I still have them both, and have read them over many times. Mary Virginia18 enjoyed them too.
With love to you and all our old friends, WillieInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1979.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1979
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, the first leaf in fragments, typewritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Elsie Cather1
- Date letter was written
- June 17, 1937
- 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
Cather's ledger indicates she sent Elsie Cather $100 on 14 June 1937.
The Autograph Edition of Cather's novels, a complete limited edition of thirteen volumes, which were published between 1937 and 1941 by Houghton Mifflin. The edition was limited to 970 copies, of which 20 copies were not for sale.
The Autograph Edition (which ended up being 13 volumes total) was limited to 970 copies, of which 20 copies were not for sale. The price for each set was originally $120 dollars.
Published in 1940, the Library Edition was printed from the same plates as the Autograph Edition but was created with less expensive materials.
Carnegie Corporation president Frederick Paul Keppel invited Cather to represent the United States on the Permanent Committee on Arts and Letters of the League of Nations in Paris in the summer of 1937 where the subject was the future of literature.
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.
Rogers, Bruce (1870-1957). American book designer and typographer.
Born in Lafayette, IN, Bruce Rogers received a BS from Purdue
University in 1890. In 1896 George H. Mifflin of Houghton Mifflin asked him
to join the Riverside Press on the basis of his experience as a newspaper
illustrator. In 1900 he took charge of the limited editions division at
Riverside and began designing type fonts. He left in 1912 to work
independently as a designer, with his crowning achievement being the Oxford
Lectern Bible, commissioned in 1929 and completed in 1935, set in his
Centaur typeface. In 1937, Houghton Mifflin hired Rogers to design the
Autograph Edition of Cather’s works. When Sapphira and the
Slave Girl (1940) was added to the set in 1941, Cather and Rogers
corresponded about design issues. Yale, Harvard, and Purdue awarded Rogers
honorary degrees, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him
the gold medal for graphic arts. He died at his home in New Fairfield, CT.
Knopf, Alfred A. (1892-1984). President of New York
publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Knopf received his BA from
Columbia University in New York City in 1912 and founded Alfred Knopf, Inc.,
in 1915 with his future wife Blanche Wolf. They married in 1916, and their
son Alfred “Pat” Knopf was born in 1918. Cather chose him as her publisher
beginning with Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920) and
One of Ours (1922), partly because she was
dissatisfied with the promotion of her books by Houghton Mifflin but also
because she recognized the high quality of Knopf's books, as well as what
she regarded as his intelligent advertising. Knopf was noted for publishing
the work of leading European and South American writers in translation, as
well as original works. Knopf and Cather’s extensive correspondence
testifies to their mutual professional respect and to what also became an
important personal friendship.
Keppel, Frederick Paul (1875-1943) (“Fred”). American philanthropist
and educator. Born on Staten Island, NY, Frederick Keppel
graduated from Columbia University in 1898. After working in publishing, he
returned to Columbia, occupying a string of administrative positions from
1910 to 1918. After serving as Newton D. Baker’s Third Assistant Secretary
of War, commissioner from the United States to the International Chamber of
Commerce, and secretary to the Greater New York Planning Board, he was
elected president of the Carnegie Corporation. At the Carnegie, he
instituted a travel grants program and supported Gunnar Myrdal’s famous race
study, American Dilemma (1944). Cather called Keppel
a “very charming person” (#1979), but she declined invitations from him to
speak.
Wilder, Thornton (1897-1975). American novelist and playwright.
Born in Madison, WI, and educated partially abroad because his
father was a diplomat, Wilder graduated from Yale University in 1920. His
second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), a
historical novel set in seventeenth-century Peru, received the Pulitzer
Prize for fiction. Leftist critics attacked his The Woman
of Andros (1930), set in pre-Christian Greece, for avoiding
contemporary life and the Great Depression. He responded with Heaven’s My Destination (1935), featuring a
depression-era salesman of religious textbooks traveling across America. Our Town (1938), his play about the fictional Grovers
Corners (modeled after Peterborough, NH), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in
drama. In the summer of 1926 Cather and Wilder met when they were both
residents of the MacDowell Writers’ Colony in Peterborough. She saw Our Town performed on Broadway and to playwright Zoë
Akins praised Wilder’s “very fine” representation of New England life and
his technique in getting a “fine poem…onto the stage successfully” (#1407).
She wrote him a fan letter telling him she loved “everything you have ever
written, but you have done nothing so fine” as Our
Town (#2014). Except for a time working in military intelligence in
World War II, Wilder continued to be an active playwright and novelist until
the end of his life. He died in Hamden, CT.
Sherwood, Carrie Miner (1869-1971). Sherwood, Carrie Belle
Miner (1869-1972) Civic leader; Cather's friend. Born in Waukon,
IA, to James L. Miner and Julia Erickson Miner, Carrie Miner was the eldest
of their children. The family moved to Red Cloud, NE, in 1878, where the
Miner Brothers store became the largest in town. Cather remembered meeting
Carrie there. In 1884, Carrie, her mother, and siblings were confirmed in
the Catholic church. In 1888, she studied music at St. Mary’s Academy at
Notre Dame, IN. She married bank clerk Walter Sherwood in late 1889; they
had two sons. The Sherwoods travelled often in the West, and visited Europe
in 1930. They built a new house at 3rd and Seward streets in Red Cloud in
1908; Cather sometimes sent materials for Carrie to keep in its spacious
attics. Carrie Miner Sherwood led local Red Cross work during the two World
Wars, served on the Red Cloud school board and park commission, and was
active in the League of Women Voters and in the Ladies Guild of Grace
Episcopal Church. Cather corresponded with Carrie Miner Sherwood throughout
her life and dedicated My Ántonia to Carrie, model
for Frances Harling in the novel, and her sister Irene. Carrie was one of
Mildred Bennett’s chief sources for The World of Willa
Cather (1951), and was instrumental in setting up what is now the
Willa Cather Foundation in Red Cloud.
Creighton, Mary S. Miner (1873-1968). Clubwoman; Cather’s
friend from childhood. Born in Iowa, Mary Miner was the second
daughter of James and Julia Miner, neighbors of the Cather family in Red
Cloud, NE. Willa Cather later recalled that when she first moved into town
with her family and enrolled in school in 1885, “Margie Miner was so jolly I
wanted awfully to know her.” They became lifelong friends and
correspondents, and Mary’s sisters Irene and Carrie were equally close to
Cather. Mary Miner wed local physician E. A. Creighton in 1900 and lived the
rest of her life in Red Cloud. She was the prototype for Julia Harling in
My Ántonia (1918).
Mellen, Mary Virginia Auld (1906-1982) (“Virginia,” “M.V.”).
Cather's niece. Born in Red Cloud, NE, to Jessica Cather Auld
and James William Auld, Mary Virginia graduated from Red Cloud High School
in 1924 and then spent a year at Dana Hall in Wellesley, MA, to qualify for
admission to Smith College in Northampton, MA. In 1929 she received an A.B.
in psychology from Smith and then moved to New York City, where she found
work at Lord & Taylor before telling her aunt of her arrival. In 1930,
probably with Willa Cather's help, she secured a position in the Circulation
Department of the New York Public Library. In 1931, she entered the
library's internal training school and in 1932 was assigned to the Tremont
branch library in the Bronx. After Mary Virginia’s parents divorced in 1933
Cather took a quasi-parental role. She paid for vacations and when, in 1935,
Mary Virginia married Richard (Dick) Mellen, a graduate of Harvard Medical
School and roommate of her brother William Thomas Auld at Amherst College,
she supervised wedding arrangements. After Dick was commissioned as a doctor
in the Air Force, Mary Virginia—much to Cather’s
regret—accompanied him to Chattanooga, TN, where he was assigned. In
Cather's will, Mary Virginia was designated a beneficiary of the literary
estate.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
The Bible
