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 write to thank you most sincerely for a letter you wrote to Mr. McClure5 regarding a story of mine6 published in the January number of McClure's Magazine7.
Your corroboration is especially grateful to me since, when I was last in New York8, I heard the story severely taken to task on the score of willful exaggeration. The people who found the thing distorted had had very little experience of life on the other side of the Missouri9, but they insisted that life was everywhere the same. I think that some of us know that, in certain respects, it is not.
It gives me a very genuine pleasure to know that the story has rung true to someone besides myself, that the treatment does not seem to you exaggerated, and that it recalls that country to you. Anyone who has lived in one of those little Western towns must, I think, have a very keen and definite feeling about it, but it is almost hopeless to try to communicate it to anyone who has not had that experience.
May I hope for your continued interest in the collection of stories10 which Mr. McClure is shortly to publish?
Please accept my warmest thanks for your strong word of encouragement and your testimony as to the fairness of my point of view. Only one like yourself, who has known the conditions and not been absorbed by them, can, I feel, really judge of a story which treats of such a discouraging and inherently unattractive situation.
Very Cordially, Willa Sibert Cather February thirteenthInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let2790.xml
- Letter identifier
- 2790
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Kate McPhelim Cleary1
- Date letter was written
- February 13 [1905]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The year of this letter is established by the publication of Cather's "The Sculptor's Funeral" in the January 1905 issue of McClure's Magazine, the only story Cather published in a January issue of that magazine.
- Place letter was written
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States2
- Location of original letter
- , Unknown Current Location
Individual Annotations
1180 Murray Hill Avenue (Pittsburgh, PA): Located in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA, now part of the Murray Hill Avenue Historic District, 1180 Murray Hill was the home of Judge Samuel A. McClung and his family. Cather lived there at Isabelle McClung’s invitation from 1901 to 1906. She returned there to visit multiple times until 1915, often writing during these visits.
Person Annotations
Cleary, Kate McPhelim (1863-1905). American novelist, poet, and short
story writer. Born in New Brunswick, Canada, to Irish immigrant
parents, Kate McPhelim began writing for publication at an early age to
supplement the McPhelim family’s meager income. In Chicago, IL, where the
family had moved in 1880, she married Michael Cleary in 1884, and the couple
moved to Hubbell, NE, where Kate Cleary gave birth to six children. She
became addicted to opium after nearly dying in childbirth in 1894, and the
family was plagued by financial and medical troubles. They moved back to
Chicago in 1898, where Cleary later admitted herself to the Eglin Asylum for
drug treatment. She published hundreds of stories in a range of newspapers
and magazines both during her time in Nebraska and after her return to
Chicago; many of them exposed the bleakness of the lives of western
pioneers. After she wrote S. S. McClure praising the publication of “The
Sculptor’s Funeral” in McClure’s Magazine (Jan.
1905), Cather replied thanking her for her understanding of the story’s
bleak depiction of a western town. Cleary died in July 1905, after
successfully defending against an attempt by Michael Cleary, from whom she
had separated, to have her involuntarily committed for insanity.
McClure, Samuel Sidney (1857-1949) (“S.S.”). Irish-born
American publisher. McClure immigrated to the U.S. at age nine,
living with his family in Indiana. Despite poverty and the limited education
he had received in Ireland, he graduated from high school and then Knox
College in Illinois. He then moved to Boston, MA, where from 1882 to 1884 he
edited the Wheelman, a bicycling magazine. Despite
opposition from her parents, he married his Knox College classmate Harriet
Hurd in 1883. The couple had four biological children (Eleanor, Bess, Mary,
and Robert), and adopted one (Enrico). In 1884, S.S. started McClure’s
Syndicate, which placed fiction in newspapers across the country. In 1893
with his college classmate John Sanborn Phillips he started McClure's Magazine, which was best-known for the
"muckraking" exposés by writers such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens,
but which also published literature. After his cousin H.H. McClure, who
worked for the McClure Syndicate, brought Cather to S.S. McClure’s
attention, McClure, Phillips & Co. brought out Cather’s first book of
fiction, The Troll Garden (1905). When most of the
editorial staff, including Steffens and Tarbell, resigned from McClure’s in 1906, he hired Cather as an editor; she
later became managing editor. After she left her position at McClure’s in 1912 and when S. S. McClure had lost
control of the magazine still bearing his name, Cather ghost wrote his
autobiography (McClure’s serial 1913-1914, book
publication 1914). McClure made repeated—and ultimately
failed—attempts to reestablish himself in journalism and magazine
publishing, often trying to enlist Cather in these enterprises. She almost
went with him to Europe in 1915 to report on the war for the Evening Mail, and she remained personally loyal to
her mercurial and often-irresponsible former employer. He served as the
prototype for Marcus O’Mally, editor of the Outcry,
in her story “Ardessa” (1918), and it has been suggested that Cather modeled
the courtship and marriage between Myra and Oswald Henshaw in My Mortal Enemy (1926) on that of the McClures.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
"The Sculptor's Funeral," McClure's Magazine (January 1905) by Willa Cather
McClure's Magazine
The Troll Garden (1905) by Willa Cather
