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 was saving my projected title4 as a surprise for you - possibly a shock. You see I think that to call a book of essays by any of the conventional titles such as PERSONALITIES AND OPINIONS is foolish. Essays are dull enough anyhow. I have the hope that these papers are less dull than most, because they are mostly accounts of personal adventures with very individual literary personalities. However such a title would not be very satisfactory, as the best paper among them is certainly the one called THE NOVEL DEMEUBLE5.
You would be much more reconciled to this title if you had gone through the text of the various essays. But you want a description of the book immediately and the paper6 on Thomas Mann7 will not be finished and properly typed before the week after next. There will be, I fear, only five essays8 in all, and of these you have read only the one9 on Mme. Groux10. It will have to be a small book and I suppose you would want to sell it at a dollar11. I haven't the least idea to just how many words it will run, because this request for information for the catalogue has come suddenly. I had expected to give you an estimate of the length of the text, i.e., number of words, about the middle of May. I don't suppose you will need to know about details of that kind for the catalogue. I hope that Mrs. Kenyon12 may be able to convert you to this title for the essays. But if you think it really too outrageous I will, of course, listen to reason. Please think it over when you get back and call me up.
Yours, Alfred A. Knopf, Esq. 730 Fifth Avenue New York2 KInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let2683.xml
- Letter identifier
- 2683
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Alfred A. Knopf1
- Date letter was written
- May 1, 1936
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Cather-Knopf Correspondence, The Dobkin Family Collection of Feminism, New York, NY
Individual Annotations
570 Park Avenue (New York City): The apartment Cather shared with Edith Lewis from December 11, 1932, until her death, located in the Manhattan borough of New York City, near Central Park. They had apartment 7D. Lewis continued to live there until her own death.
When published in November 1936, Not Under Forty contained six essays: "A Chance Meeting," "The Novel Démeublé," "148 Charles Street," "Miss Jewett," "'Joseph and his Brothers,'" and "Katherine Mansfield."
Not Under Forty was published on 23 November 1936 and sold for $2.00 per copy.
Person Annotations
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.
Mann, Thomas (1875-1955). German author. Born in Lübeck,
Germany, to Johann Heinrich Mann and Julia da Silva Bruhns Mann, Thomas Mann
first worked as a clerk for a Munich insurance company and on the editorial
staff of Simplicissimus, a satirical weekly. In 1898
he published his first novel, Little Herr Friedemann.
His other novels include Buddenbrooks (1901), Death in Venice (1912), and The
Beloved Returns (1939). Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1929, and in the U.S. he was published by Alfred A. Knopf,
Inc. Cather confessed she found Mann’s Magic Mountain
(1924) “dull,” although she did enjoy Joseph in Egypt
(1936), part of his tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers
(1933-1943) (#1331). Her appreciation of first two volumes of the tetralogy,
“Joseph and His Brothers,” appeared in a symposium on Mann’s work in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1936 and appeared
soon after in her collection Not Under Forty (1936).
Grout, Caroline Hamard (1846-1931). Niece of Gustave Flaubert, memoirist. Born near Rouen, France, Caroline Hamard is the “Caro” of Gustave Flaubert’s Lettres à sa Nièce Caroline (1906). When she was two months old, her mother, Flaubert’s sister, died and her father was incapacitated by mental illness. She was raised by her maternal grandmother and uncle Gustave at their home, Croisset. Her first husband, Ernest Commanville, died in 1890; she was married to Dr. Franklin Grout from 1900 until his death in 1920. Her Souvenirs sur Gustave Flaubert was published in 1897 as the preface to the first edition of Flaubert’s correspondence, and her memoir about her uncle, Heures d’autrefois. Mémoires inédits. Souvenirs intimes et autres textes, was published posthumously in 1999. In 1930, when she was known as Caroline Franklin Grout, Willa Cather met her at the Grand-Hôtel d’Aix in the French resort town Aix-les-Bains. Cather’s essay “A Chance Meeting,” first published in the February 1933 Atlantic Monthly and collected in Not Under Forty (1936), recounts how she met Grout during the intermission of a concert and and enjoyed wide-ranging conversations with her in ensuing days.
Kenyon, Marjorie Scott (1898-1989). Staff member at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Born in St. Louis, MO, to Margaret L. Scott Kenyon and Samuel S. Kenyon, Marjorie Scott Kenyon worked as a secretary for Alfred A. Knopf and corresponded with Willa Cather. Kenyon also worked as a secretary for Ed Hanley of KSRO Radio, William A. Townes, the manager of the Press Democrat, and for Herbert Slater Junior High.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Not Under Forty (1936) by Willa Cather
"The Novel Démeublé," New Republic (April 12, 1922) by Willa Cather
"Birth of Personality, The: An Appreciation of Thomas Mann's Trilogy," Saturday Review of Literature (June 6, 1936) by Willa Cather
"A Chance Meeting," Atlantic Monthly (February 1933) by Willa Cather
