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 |
It's the very devil—the way every attempt to get us together has gone wrong. I'm sure we'll be more lucky when I come back. Then I'm going to find an apartment somewhere—(maybe Brooklyn Heights3 for quiet) and not live in a Fifth Avenue hotel4 among a lot of brokers who walk like captives into the dining room behind their fat wives every night, their chins down over the dress shirt the wives insist on.
Thank you for the pink roses that came last night. I had been too tired to get any, and it was the first night I'd been with no flowers at all. I'd kept the rooms full before that, and they'd kept me alive.
I'm off tomorrow, so goodbye until I come back, and a Merry, Merry Christmas!
See the Irish Players5 if you can. Awful department store pen—can't write with it.
Goodbye, my dear. W. S. C. Miss Louise Guerber1 Metropolitan Museum of Art Fifth Ave. & 81st Street City2 TIMES SQ STA. N.Y.2 DEC 1 1927 3-PM LORD & [missing] FIFTH AVE NEW YORK2 THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUMOF ART
RECEIVED
DEC 2 1927
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let2883.xml
- Letter identifier
- 2883
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, handwritten on recto of each leaf only. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Louise Guerber1
- Date letter was written
- [December 1, 1927]
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Willa Cather Collection (Burroughs 26), Drew University Library, Special Collections and Archives, Madison, NJ
Individual Annotations
Ruth Putnam Lewis, Edith Lewis's sister, lived in Brooklyn Heights in the 1920s.
Grosvenor Hotel (New York City): When Cather and Edith Lewis lost their 5 Bank Street apartment in 1927, they moved into the Grosvenor Hotel, where they continued to live until 1932. The hotel was located at 35 Fifth Avenue in the Manhattan borough of New York City.
The Irish Players were touring the U.S. and performed "The Plough at the Stars" (1926) by Sean O'Casey at the Hudson Theater in New York City in late November, moving to the Gallo in mid-December.
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.
Place Annotations
