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 |
200 GUESTS The Shattuck Inn4
and Annex ALL MODERN
CONVENIENCES AT THE FOOT OF MONADNOCK MOUNTAIN
JAFFREY, N. H.2 AMERICAN PLAN
OPEN ALL THE YEAR
Thanks aw-ful-ly! The Latin5 isn't as pretty as I hoped it would be. I wish Virgil6 had written it instead of old Suetonius7,—He would never have used an ugly word like conjugii. But I think it will serve my purpose, anyhow. I don't see how you1 could find it so quickly. Had you really sent for Bauer's candy before you got my letter8? I do think that's rather spooky. I worked all morning and walked eight miles this afternoon, so this sleepy scratch is just to thank you and say goodnight.
W. S. C. THE SHATTUCK INN AT THE FOOT OF MONADNOCK MOUNTAIN JAFFREY, N.H.2 Miss Louise Guerber1 Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City3 N. Y. JAFFREY N. H.2 OCT 23 1926 6 30 AMInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let2873.xml
- Letter identifier
- 2873
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Louise Guerber1
- Date letter was written
- [October 22, 1926]
- Place letter was written
- Jaffrey, New Hampshire, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Willa Cather Collection (Burroughs 26), Drew University Library, Special Collections and Archives, Madison, NJ
Individual Annotations
Shattuck Inn (Jaffrey, NH): Hotel built in 1910 in Jaffrey, N,H owned and operated by E. C. Shattuck until his death in February 1933, when operation was taken over by his daughter, Eleanor Shattuck Austermann, and her husband George Austermann. Cather stayed at the Shattuck Inn many times, often with Edith Lewis, finding it a useful place to work. In 1947, Cather wrote of the Shattuck Inn: “I have never found any place where I could work in such peace and happiness as in the little rooms up in the top of the Shattuck Inn” (#1748).
Cather requested help locating a Latin quotation in #2872.
Cather asked about the candy in #2871.
Person Annotations
Burroughs, Ella Louise Guerber (1900-1985) (“Louise”). American librarian and curator. Ella Louise Guerber was born in Allentown, PA, and graduated from Cedar Crest College in 1919 and then the library school at Columbia University. At the time she met Cather in 1925, she was a reference librarian at the Denver Public Library and assisted Cather with her research on Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). In 1926, Guerber moved to New York City to take a position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she saw Cather frequently in person. She married Bryson Burroughs, Curator of Paintings, in 1928; he died in 1934. In 1950, when she received an honorary degree from Cedar Crest, she was Associate Curator of Paintings at the Met. After her retirement, she moved to Baltimore, MD, and then Princeton, NJ, where she died. Her friendship with Cather is documented by more than seventy letters from Cather to Burroughs from 1925 through Cather’s late life and by a diary documenting her in-person interactions with Cather from 1925 through 1927.
Virgil (70BCE-19 BCE). Roman poet, author of the Aeneid and Georgics. As a girl in Red Cloud, NE, Willa Cather studied Virgil with William Ducker, an educated Englishman who was a businessman in the town; when she continued her studies of Latin and Greek at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, she read with him in the summers. Virgil’s influence is apparent in Cather’s poems in April Twilights (1905), and Jim Burden, the narrator of My Ántonia (1918), studies Virgil at the University of Nebraska with Gaston Cleric. Jim experiences a key moment of insight when reading Virgil’s Georgics, and a quotation from the Georgics (“Optima dies . . . prima fugit”: The best days are the first to flee) appears as an epigraph to Cather’s novel.
Tranquillus, Caius Suetonious (c. 59-c. 140) (“Suetonious”). Roman biographer. Suetonious’s De Vitae Caesurum, a collection of biographies of the twelve Caesars (emperors of Rome), beginning with Julius Caesar and ending with Domitian, survived in a nearly complete form. Before visiting Rome in 1908, Willa Cather read Suetonious in Latin.
Place Annotations
