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 see a letter from you in the morning mail. Edith3 was called to Boston4 yesterday by the serious illness of her old aunt5. She will hardly be back before the first of the week. She left in haste, from the office. I did not see her. We often talk of you, and are hoping to have a glimpse of you before long.
Hastily Willa CatherInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let2991.xml
- Letter identifier
- 2991
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Rudolph Ruzicka 1
- Date letter was written
- [January 5, 1927 to February 3, 1927]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The conjectured date range is derived from information about Edith Lewis's aunt, Ellen Maria Gould, referenced in the letter. The range begins the first Wednesday of 1927 and ends the last Wednesday before Gould's February 7, 1927, death.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Rudolph Ruzicka papers, 1834-1980 (MS-1078), Dartmouth College, Rauner Special Collections Library, Hanover, NH
Person Annotations
Ruzicka, Rudolph (1883-1978) (“Rudolf”). Czech-American wood
engraver, illustrator, painter, and type designer. Born in
Kourim, Bohemia, Rudolf (later also spelled Rudolph) Ruzicka moved with his
family to Chicago, IL, in 1894, where he took drawing lessons at the Hull
House School, apprenticed as a wood engraver, and studied at the Art
Institute of Chicago. In 1903 he moved to New York City and worked engraving
bank notes while taking classes at the Art Students’ League and the New York
School of Art. Cather likely first met Ruzicka around 1910, when his
classmate painter Earl Brewster married Edith Lewis’s college classmate
Achsah Barlow. Ruzicka married Filomena Sprova in Prague, Czhecoslovakia, in
1914, and they had two daughters, Tatiana and Veronica. He is best known for
his collaborations on fine press editions and for his type design,
including, beginning in 1935, linotype fonts. He produced designs for the
dust jackets of Obscure Destinies (1932), Lucy Gayheart (1935), and Sapphira
and the Slave Girl (1940), and Cather and Lewis sent out Christmas
cards featuring his designs in 1915, 1916, and 1935. Ruzicka attended
Cather’s funeral and helped Edith Lewis design Cather’s tombstone. Ruzicka
lived in various locations in Westchester County, NY, until his wife died c.
1961 and he moved to Norwich, VT, to live with his daughter, Veronica Laing.
He died in Hanover, NH.
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.
Gould, Ellen Maria (1848-1927). American reformer and educator; Edith Lewis’s aunt. Born in Rhode Island to Quaker parents, Ellen Gould moved with her family to Davenport, IA, in 1857. Her sister Lillie Gould (later Lewis) was Edith Lewis’s mother. As a teenager Ellen worked for the Soldier’s Aid Society. After the Civil War she helped organize the woman’s suffrage organization in Davenport and was very active in the work of the local Unitarian Church, which her parents helped establish, and in numerous cultural and benevolent organizations. After teaching for two years in an industrial school for poor children, she served as its director for six years. By 1920, she had moved to Cambridge, MA, where her sister Lillie was then living. She died in Cambridge and was buried in Davenport.
Place Annotations
