Guide to Reading Letter Transcriptions
Some of these features are only visible when "plain text" is off.
| 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 |
You are a violinist, put the mute on the biography—no the extinguisher! Anything more deadly dull than this jacket text, I can't imagine. It's all too foolish, and I really don't think it's up to the office to hand out these dull facts. They tell absolutely nothing about the book3, or about me, nothing that the public wants to know.
Now, I want you to let me decide on this jacket text. Tell the public
something they do want know, something they
write me letters about until my hand is fairly crippled with answering them;
tell
them
something
about
how
and
why
the
book
was
written! That is what they want to
know. Instead of this wooden stuff about
my grandfathers4 and
Von Schmidt's5 (who in thunder
cares about our grandfathers?) use this condensation I enclose of my letter6 to the Commonweal7 about the book. The English publishers8 had that letter printed in
pamphlet form and gave it wide circulation—wrote me it was singularly
effective in advertising. I have cut the article to just about the number of
words now in the two dreary sketches of Von
Schmidt and me in the now on the jacket.
Please telegraph me9 that you
will use the copy I'm sending you, and not
that which is now in the proof of the jacket; and please write me the name
of the person who wrote this copy, as I want to talk with her—I think or him—when I get back to town10.
Now as to the copy I send you—very ragged, but I'm lucky to have even that with me.
- 1. Use quotes before each paragraph
- 2. When the long cuts occur, please end the paragraph with asterisks.
- 3. Please read the proofs yourself and telephone me if you're in doubt about anything.
Please note the change in the newspaper comment quoted. I beg you to use the11 one12 from the New Republic13 instead of that14 from the Baltimore Sun15.
Dear Miss Aaron16;Please get all this to Mr. Stimson1, as I have telephoned him about it.
W. S. C.Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let2609.xml
- Letter identifier
- 2609
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, handwritten on recto and verso of both leaves.
- Person to whom letter was written
- George M. Stimson1
- Date letter was written
- October 17 [1929]
- Place letter was written
- Jaffrey, New Hampshire, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Cather-Knopf Correspondence, The Dobkin Family Collection of Feminism, New York, NY
Individual Annotations
William Heinemann Ltd. published Death Comes for the Archbishop in November 1927.
On 19 October 1929, Stimson telegraphed that the "old jacket copy has been put in quicklime."
See #2591 for the Lovett quotation that appeared on the jacket.
No conventional review of Death Comes for the Archbishop in the Baltimore Sun has been located, although a quotation may have been used from a news article about of a sermon by Rabbi Edward L. Israel favorably comparing Cather's novel with Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry. "Intellectual Clergy Admired But Unwanted, Rabbi Says," 7 November 1927.
Person Annotations
Stimson, George Mirick (1882-1950). Printer employed at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Born in Ponta Delgada in the Azores to an American father and an English mother, by 1916 George Stimson was working as a printer at the Riverside Press of the Houghton Mifflin Co. In the late 1920s, he worked in the production department of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Willa Cather corresponded with him about design and printing issues. By 1942 he had left Knopf for the Macmillan Co.
Cather, William (1823-1887). Farmer; Cather’s grandfather.
Born in Back Creek Valley, VA, a son of James and Ann Howard Cather,
William Cather farmed and also raised sheep. He married Emily Anne Caroline
Smith in 1846, and they had two sons and three daughters who survived to
adulthood. In 1851, William Cather built a brick house he named “Willow
Shade,” where Willa Cather lived in her early childhood. William Cather and
his wife sided with the Union during the Civil War; after the war, William
Cather served his community as sheriff and funded schools. After visiting
his eldest son, George P. Cather, in Nebraska in 1874, he decided to settle
there, eventually bringing their surviving children, including Charles F.
Cather, Willa’s father. Later William turned his Webster County farmland
over to Charles, and he and his wife moved to Red Cloud, NE, taking their
orphaned grandchildren Kyd Clutter and Retta Ayre, with them. Cather
portrayed her paternal grandparents as Grandfather and Grandmother Burden in
My Ántonia (1918).
Boak, William Lee Washington (1805-1854). American politician;
Cather’s grandfather. Born in a part of Virginia that is now
West Virginia, Boak married Rachel Seibert in 1830. At least six of their
nine children lived to adulthood, including the youngest, Mary Virginia
Boak, Cather’s mother. Boak represented Berkeley County in the Virginia
House of Delegates for three terms, ran a hotel in Martinsburg, WV, and then
moved with his growing family to Washington, DC, around 1845, where he
worked for the federal government and presided over a boarding house kept by
his wife. He was the prototype for Michael Blake in Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940).
Von Schmidt, Harold (1893-1982). American illustrator.
Born in Alameda, CA, Harold Von Schmidt trained at the California
College of Arts and Crafts. In 1924, after his first marriage ended, he
moved to New York City to study with Harvey Dunn at the Grand Central Art
School and achieved great success as a magazine illustrator specializing in
Western action scenes. Von Schmidt illustrated the serialization of Death Comes for the Archbishop for the Forum in 1927, and one of his drawings was adapted
for the book’s dust jacket. He also collaborated with Elmer Adler on the
deluxe illustrated edition of the novel published in 1929. In 1927 he
married his second wife, Forrest Gilmore, and moved to Westport, CT, where
they had two children. In 1948 he was recruited to help establish the Famous
Artist Course School there. He died in Westport.
Aaron, M. Manley. Alfred Knopf’s secretary. As secretary to the president of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., Willa Cather’s publisher, Manley Aaron was responsible for clerical matters, such as tracking Cather’s address as she traveled or mailing her supplies. However, Alfred Knopf also delegated to Aaron the task of negotiating with magazines for the publication of Cather’s short stories collected in Obscure Destinies (1932), and she took direct responsibility for other matters for Cather and other authors as well.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) by Willa Cather
"Letter from Willa Cather to the Editor of the Commonweal, A," Commonweal (November 27, 1927) by Willa Cather
Commonweal
"A Death in the Desert," New Republic (October 26, 1927) by Robert Morss Lovett
New Republic
Baltimore Sun
