Guide to Reading Letter Transcriptions
Some of these features are only visible when "plain text" is off.
| 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'm so very glad to know where you are again, and I do thank you for your vivid account of the blossoming of the many-colored jackets4 on Fifth Avenue. I gather from the reviews that they had better not have blossomed! There were some very nice ones5, like6 the Atlantic7, but most of those I've seen have been savage. The only one that hurts me at all is a very nasty8 one9 in the Forum10, and that because the editor11 is an old friend. I wrote "Double Birthday"12 for him when I could have got a lot more money for it elsewhere.
Princeton was really very jolly. I was awfully pleased to see a good deal of the Lindberghs13. There were a lot of fine people up for degrees14 and things. Miss Lewis15 and I got up here the first of July and found our little house so snug and trim. I've finished two new short stories16, and chopped five trees and grubbed out thistles and black alder bushes, and had a lovely French landscape paper put on my bed room—all goats and rabbits in a warm yellow background. I love to waken up in the morning and look at my walls with the sun pouring over them. We've had so many blue and gold days this year, with enough soft fog between to make one feel the real North. But it's always cool. The weather is a constant joy, like poetry or music. I've done a lot of carpenter work about the place—I'm right handy with tools. I've just been reading "Fathers & Sons"17 over again at night. For me there is no modern writer like that one18. He is like the ground and the grass and the fir trees. Please don't be afraid of me—that's the next step to distrust. But I am never myself in a New York3 hotel19—always rather savage and on my guard. I will be like that, I suppose, until I get some better kind of life.
Affectionately Willa Cather Mrs. Bryson Burroughs1 Metropolitan Museum of Art Fifth Ave. & 81st Street New York N. Y.3 U. S. A. NORTH HEAD2 Aug 23 1931 THE METROPOLITANMUSEUM OF ART
RECEIVED
AUG 25 1931
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let2898.xml
- Letter identifier
- 2898
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, handwritten on recto and verso of each leaf. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Louise Guerber Burroughs1
- Date letter was written
- [August 23, 1931]
- Place letter was written
- Grand Manan, New Brunswick, Canada2
- Location of original letter
- Willa Cather Collection (Burroughs 26), Drew University Library, Special Collections and Archives, Madison, NJ
Individual Annotations
Ethel Wallace Hawkins describes Cather's "quiet chronicle" as "full of the pathos of humanity--the eagerness, the effort, and above all the transitoriness, emphasized by the mighty background against which the shadow-shapes come and go." She particularly praises the novel's construction and Cather's delineation of character, as well as describing Cather's "pictures of the city on the rock" as "above praise."
Granville Hicks acknowledged that Cather's recreation of seventeeth-century Quebec is "not at all unconvincing" but goes on to explain that "when taken together with Death Comes for the Archbishop," Shadows on the Rock "makes quite clear why she is and always has been a minor artist." He claims Shadows demonstrates "a failure of the will," and that "To-day perhaps even more than in the past, it takes stern stuff to make a novelist."
Cather received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Princeton University at a ceremony on 16 June 1931. The New York Times noted that she received the most attention among the honorees, as she was the first woman to receive a degree from Princeton.
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.
Leach, Henry Goddard (1880-1970). American author, educator, and editor. Leach (Princeton University BA 1903, Harvard University PhD 1908) was a leading authority on Scandinavian literature. He served as editor of The Forum from 1923 to 1940 and president of the American-Scandinavian Foundation from 1926 to 1947. The Forum serialized Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and published “Double Birthday” (1929) in two parts. When Granville Hicks used a review of Shadows on the Rock (1931) in the Forum to launch what Cather perceived as an attack on her personally, she was aggrieved but accepted Leach’s apparent apology. It is not clear when Cather and Leach first met, and their extant correspondence relates exclusively to his work as editor of the Forum. However, in the 1940s she called him an “old friend” and apparently saw him socially in New York City (#2191).
Lindbergh, Anne Morrow (1906-2001). American author and
aviator. Born in Englewood, NJ, to Dwight Morrow and Elizabeth
Cutter Morrow, Anne Morrow graduated from Smith College in 1928 with a
degree in English. She married aviator Charles Lindbergh in 1929 and became
his copilot. Cather met the Lindberghs in 1931, when both she and Charles
Lindbergh were given honorary degrees by Princeton University. On March 1,
1932, the Lindberghs first child, Charles Jr., was kidnapped; the crime and
the discovery of the boy’s body ten weeks later were a media sensation.
Cather admired Anne Lindbergh’s first book, North to the
Orient (1935), which recounted her 1931 journey with Charles to
Asia via the great circle route in 1931. Lindbergh’s best-known book is Gift from the Sea (1955), an inspirational meditation
on modern life and particularly the challenges facing women, which has sold
more than three million copies.
Lindbergh, Charles Augustus (1902-1974). American aviator.
Born in Detroit, MI, to parents of Swedish descent and raised in
Minnesota, Charles Lindbergh wanted to become a flyer in World War I but was
too young. After three semesters studying engineering at the University of
Wisconsin, he left to become a barnstorming pilot and later enlisted in the
Army Air Service and became a captain in the Missouri National Guard.
Lindbergh’s 1927 nonstop flight from New York to Paris piloting the Spirit
of St. Louis made him an international celebrity. In 1929 he married Anne
Cutter Morrow, who became his copilot. Cather met the Lindberghs in 1931,
when both she and Charles Lindbergh were given honorary degrees by Princeton
University. On March 1, 1932, the Lindberghs first child, Charles Jr., was
kidnapped; the crime and the discovery of the boy’s body ten weeks later
were a media sensation. In 1939 Charles Lindbergh advocated against American
involvement in World War II, and although he eventually supported the war,
his non-interventionist stance tarnished his reputation. His bestselling
book about his pioneering flight, The Spirit of St.
Louis (1953), was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
Lewis, Edith Labaree (1881-1972). Magazine editor,
advertising copywriter, and Cather's domestic partner. Born in
Lincoln, NE, to Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Edith Lewis
attended the preparatory school associated with the University of Nebraska,
earning college credits from the University before transferring to Smith
College in Northampton, MA, in 1899. She received an A.B. in English from
Smith in 1902 and returned home to teach elementary school. She met Willa
Cather in the summer of 1903 at the home of Sarah Harris, publisher of the
Lincoln Courier. Moving to New York City soon
afterward, Lewis settled into a studio on Washington Square and found work
at the Century Publishing Company. Cather was her guest when she visited the
city from Pittsburgh. In 1906, at Cather's suggestion, Lewis applied for a
position as an editorial proofreader at McClure's
Magazine, and the two women worked together on the McClure's staff for six years. In 1908, they moved
into a shared apartment at 82 Washington Place, and then, in 1912, to Five
Bank Street. Lewis left McClure's in 1915 to become
managing editor of Every Week Magazine, where she
stayed until the magazine folded in 1918. In 1919 she began a long career as
an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Co. In 1926 Edith Lewis
acquired the land on which she and Cather built their cottage on Grand Manan
Island. When they lost their apartment on Bank Street to subway construction
in 1927, they shared quarters at the Grosvenor Hotel when they were both in
New York City. In 1932 they took an apartment at 570 Park Avenue. Throughout
their relationship, Lewis was closely involved in Cather's creative process,
reading and editing her work in pre-publication forms. Cather's will
appointed Lewis as executor of her literary estate and a beneficiary of her
literary trust. Lewis authorized E.K. Brown as Cather's first biographer and
published her own memoir of Cather, Willa Cather
Living (1953). She remained in their Park Avenue apartment after
Cather's death and died there after a long period of illness and invalidism.
She is buried at Cather's side in Jaffrey, NH.
Turgenev, Ivan (1818-1883). Russian novelist, short story writer, and
playwright. Born into a landed family in Russia, Ivan Turgenev
studied at the universities of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlin, returning
to Russia anxious to bring his country into line with the ideas of Western
European Enlightenment. He spent most of his life in France and Germany,
being particularly influenced by Gustave Flaubert; he also had a life-long
relationship with singer Pauline Garcia Viardot. His relationships with his
fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky were sometimes
damaged by political differences. Turgenev's early short story collection
A Sportsman's Sketches (1852) was his first work
to attract favorable attention; it was followed by several short novels and
his masterpiece, Fathers and Sons (1862). Cather read
Turgenev in translation as early as her childhood years in Red Cloud, NE,
and often referred to him off-handedly in her early journalism and later
interviews and speeches. She, like many critics and writers, evidently
admired his craft and perception.
Place Annotations
Grand Manan, New Brunswick, CanadaCather and Edith
Lewis frequently vacationed on Grand Manan Island during the summer and
early fall for about twenty years, beginning in 1922. For the first few
years, they stayed at the Inn at Whale Cove, a collection of cottages with a
main house operated by Sarah Jacobus. Cather and Lewis rented Orchardside
Cottage from Jacobus until they had their own cottage built. In 1926, Lewis
acquired land on Grand Manan, and construction was completed in 1928. Cather
and Lewis returned to this cottage almost every summer until
1940.
Work Annotations
Shadows on the Rock (1931) by Willa Cather
"The Atlantic Bookshelf," Atlantic Monthly (August 1931) by Ethel Wallace Hawkins
Atlantic Monthly
"Bright Incidents," Forum (September 1931) by Granville Hicks
Forum
"Double Birthday," Forum (February 1929) by Willa Cather
"Two Friends," Woman's Home Companion (July 1932) by Willa Cather
"Three Women," Ladies Home Journal (September to November, 1932) by Willa Cather
Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan Turgenev
