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 |
Your letter has lain a long while unanswered, but I have been in a distant part of Canada3, and many letters accumulated here2 while I was travelling.
I wish I could drop in on your Chaucer4 class. I am afraid there is very little imaginative teaching of that sort going on in this country. I always feel that a certain understanding of the mediaeval mind and life is necessary to anyone who is ever to have a strong feeling for any form of art. And as you say, religion was the object of so much mediaeval thought and everyday living.
The question you ask me relating to the Modern Library edition of "Death Comes for the Archbishop"5, I will try to
answer frankly. When the book had been out for several years, many urgent
appeals came from schools and even from book sellers for a cheap edition of
the book. I had never consented to a cheap edition of any of my books.
Houghton Mifflin once made a cheap
edition6 of "O Pioneers"7 without my
consent, but eventually decided that this was not good policy and took the
cheap edition off the market. In the case of "Death Comes for the
Archbishop", however, I made an exception and consented8 that an employee9 of Mr.
Knopf10's office should make a five-year contract with the Modern
Library to make
publish a cheap edition for poor
students. Mr. Knopf himself was then in Europe11. In the five years covered by their contract, the
Modern Library sold 69,000 copies of the book, on which I received 6 cents a
copy. My normal royalty on the regular edition is 36 cents a copy. While the
sales of the Modern Library edition by no means stopped the sales of the
regular edition, it did, of course, cut into it. And when the five-year
contract had expired I felt that I had done my duty by the poor student, and
decided once and for all not to renew the contract.
I think you must know from your own experience
observation, Mr. Hench, that when a
student really wants a book he can always manage to to buy it. No student ever went through college on a
smaller allowance than that on which I went through the University of
Nebraska. Yet, I could always manage, by doing without other things, to get
a book that I very much wanted. There are today in my library a number of
books for which I feel a particular affection (affection for the physical
book), because I bought them at the cost of very considerable sacrifice.
When Scribner's Thistle edition12
of Stevenson13 first came out, I boldly
ordered the whole set and paid $1 a month on it for something like two and
one-half years.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let3133.xml
- Letter identifier
- 3133
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, typewritten on recto only of each leaf. Includes one envelope, typewritten.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Atcheson L. Hench 1
- Date letter was written
- May 16, 1940
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Atcheson L. Hench Autograph Collection (6435), University of Virginia, Special Collections, Charlottesville, VA
Individual Annotations
In #0960, Cather agreed to a one dollar edition of O Pioneers! but not My Ántonia.
On 21 November 1929, Cather signed and returned to Manley Aaron at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., a letter of agreement for publication of Death Comes for the Archbishop in the Modern Library. She agreed to an early fall 1931 release of not fewer than 35,000 copies, for which she was to be paid six cents per copy.
The Thistle edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's works was published by subscription only from 1895 to 1899, so it was probably a significant investment on Cather's part in the 1890s. Later, when Houghton Mifflin wanted to do a collected edition of Cather's work, she held up the Thistle Edition as a model.
Person Annotations
Hench, Atcheson Laughlin (1891-1974). American academic. Born in New Jersey and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, Atcheson Hench attended Lafayette College and earned an MA (1917) and PhD (1921) in English from Harvard. A specialist in Medieval literature, he began teaching at the University of Virginia in 1922, continuing until his 1960 retirement. He was also interested in contemporary literature and amassed a substantial collection of letters from twentieth century authors, including Cather, with whom he corresponded.
Chaucer, Geoffrey (c. 1340-1400). British poet, author of The Canterbury Tales. Cather does not
allude to Chaucer in her fiction, but she reread him late in life while
hospitalized and praised his work as intellectual food that made her “want
to get well and live" (#1685).
Aaron, M. Manley. Alfred Knopf’s secretary. As secretary to the president of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., Willa Cather’s publisher, Manley Aaron was responsible for clerical matters, such as tracking Cather’s address as she traveled or mailing her supplies. However, Alfred Knopf also delegated to Aaron the task of negotiating with magazines for the publication of Cather’s short stories collected in Obscure Destinies (1932), and she took direct responsibility for other matters for Cather and other authors as well.
Knopf, Alfred A. (1892-1984). President of New York
publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Knopf received his BA from
Columbia University in New York City in 1912 and founded Alfred Knopf, Inc.,
in 1915 with his future wife Blanche Wolf. They married in 1916, and their
son Alfred “Pat” Knopf was born in 1918. Cather chose him as her publisher
beginning with Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920) and
One of Ours (1922), partly because she was
dissatisfied with the promotion of her books by Houghton Mifflin but also
because she recognized the high quality of Knopf's books, as well as what
she regarded as his intelligent advertising. Knopf was noted for publishing
the work of leading European and South American writers in translation, as
well as original works. Knopf and Cather’s extensive correspondence
testifies to their mutual professional respect and to what also became an
important personal friendship.
Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-1894). Scottish writer. Born in
Edinburgh, Scotland, Stevenson refused to allow his always fragile health to
suppress his adventurous spirit. After taking a law degree, he lived and
traveled in France, where in 1876 he met his future wife, a married
American, Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, in 1876. They were married in 1880, and
he produced his best-known works—Treasure
Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886) and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886)—in the years that followed. In 1888 he set sail for the South
Seas, settling on the Samoan island of Upolo in 1890, where he died and is
buried. Cather admired Stevenson’s writing, discussing him in her journalism
in the 1890s, and cherished her “Thistle Edition” of Stevenson’s collected
works, published from 1895-1899 by Scribner’s.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) by Willa Cather
O Pioneers! (1913) by Willa Cather
