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 |
35 FIFTH AVENUE
New York2 Sunday My Dear Louise1;
A thousand, thousand thanks for that fat bottle! I've already made deep
in-roads in it, for on the day after Christmas I actually finished this
book4 at last! Very soon you will see some
proof sheets of the first part, as the first half is now with the printers.
I'm much interested in the opinion of it in the Knopf office, as
everybody there likes it better than the Archbishop5. I'll tell you th
some of their reasons when I see you.
Thank you both6 for the very loveliest of all my Christmas cards.
Happy New Year! Willa Cather Mrs. Bryson Burroughs1 Metropolitan Museum of Art Fifth Ave. & 81st St New York2 NEW YORK, N. Y. 52 DEC 28 1930 9-PM The Grosvenor 35 FIFTH AVENUE New York2 THE METROPOLITAN[missing]
RECEIVED
DEC 29 1930
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let2894.xml
- Letter identifier
- 2894
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Louise Guerber Burroughs1
- Date letter was written
- [December 28, 1930]
- 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
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.
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.
Burroughs, Bryson (1869-1934). American painter and curator. Born in Massachusetts and raised in Ohio, Bryson Burroughs studied painting at the Art Students League in New York City and then in Paris under Luc-Olivier Merson and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. He became Curator of Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1909 but also continued to paint and exhibit his own works. He is known for increasing American holdings at the museum. Burroughs married sculptor Edith Woodman in 1893; the couple had two children before she died in 1916. In 1928, he married Louise Guerber. He died of tuberculosis.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Shadows on the Rock (1931) by Willa Cather
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) by Willa Cather
