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 |
Please come any Friday afternoon, I am always at home then if I am in town2. I hope I can join your company on Tuesday night, but that is uncertain. I have promised to go to the opera with a friend from Pittsburgh4 on Tuesday evening if he is in New York then—if he is not, I shall certainly go to the National Arts Club5.
I shall be very glad indeed to have you include "Grandmither"6 in the book7 you are preparing. Let me send you a corrected version, however, for there are sad slips in Mr. Badger8's version. No, I don't think you will have to get his permission to use the poem, as I own the copyright. I'll send you a copy of the book9 with that poem corrected. I'm pleased that you like it. It is certainly very much better than anything else in the book.
Very cordially yours Willa Sibert Cather Miss Jessie B. Rittenhouse1 106 Morningside Drive New York2 NEW YORK, N.Y. STA O2 FEB 21 1913 330 PMInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let2454.xml
- Letter identifier
- 2454
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only. Includes one handwritten envelope. The envelope is held by the Newberry Library in Chicago, IL, in the Benjamin D. Hitz Papers, 1913-1949 (Midwest.MS.Hitz-Cather).
- Person to whom letter was written
- Jessie B. Rittenhouse 1
- Date letter was written
- February 21, 1913
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Berg Collection Cather m.b., New York Public Library, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York, NY
Individual Annotations
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.
Started in 1898 by author and critic Charles De Kay, the National Arts Club was a place for artists and art patrons to gather in New York. In 1906, the club acquired the Tilden Mansion at 14 and 15 Gramercy Park South in New York City, where it still remains.
Person Annotations
Scollard, Jessie B. Rittenhouse (1869-1948). American anthologist and
poet. After working as a teacher, book reviewer, and reporter in
western New York, Rittenhouse moved to Boston, MA, in 1899 and to New York
City in 1905 to pursue a literary career. She published several volumes of
verse and several anthologies and reviewed poetry for the New York Times Review of Books. In 1914 she was one of the
founders of the Poetry Society of America. Her anthology, The Little Book of Modern Verse (1913), included Cather’s
“Grandmither, Think Not I Forget,” for which Cather made some revisions.
Rittenhouse married poet Clinton Scollard in 1924.
Badger, Richard G. (1878-1937). American publisher. Born in Massachusetts, Badger established his printing house before he was twenty; one of the first books he published was Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Children of the Night (1897). Many of the books from his press were subsidized by the authors, including Cather’s first book, April Twilights (1903); in 1908 she bought the unsold copies of it. In addition to poetry, Badger also published avant-garde plays and fiction in the 1910s and books on abnormal psychology.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
"Grandmither, Think Not I Forget," April Twilights (1903) by Willa Sibert Cather
Little Book of Modern Verse: A selection from the work of contemporaneous American poets (1913) ; edited by Jessie B. Rittenhouse
April Twilights (1903) by Willa Cather
