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 December 6, 1928. Dear Dr. Van Dyke1:
It is a great pleasure and honor to receive your letter. I wish it were possible to answer your question in person, but I could not do that in the immediate future, as I am leaving within a few days to spend Christmas in my own little town4 in Nebraska5. The question you ask came to me so many times after this book6 was published that I wrote an explanatory letter7 to the Commonweal8, the representative Catholic publication. Since the book was an historical narrative, I took pleasure in making it as accurate as possible.
While some of the incidents are fullywholly imaginary, they are
all in the spirit of the two principal characters, I think, and a great many of the
incidents are narrated pretty much as they occurred. I have received a number of
letters from very old priests who worked under these two missionaries9, and they generously insist that their memory
of them is exactly identical with my conception of them. Myself, I very much doubt
whether that can be true, but at any rate it is pleasant to have these old
missionaries feel so.
With the deepest appreciation of your kindness in writing to me, I am
Very sincerely yours, Willa CatherI enclose a copy10 of the statement I made for the Commonweal, which tells the story of how I came to write the book, as frankly as I could put it.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let3289.xml
- Letter identifier
- 3289
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only. Includes enclosed letter by Cather printed in the Commonweal.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Henry Van Dyke 1
- Date letter was written
- December 6, 1928
- Accompanying this letter
-
Includes enclosed clipping titled "A Letter from Willa Cather to the Editor of the Commonweal" by Willa Cather dated November 23, 1927, and printed in the November 27, 1927, issue of the Commonweal.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Henry Van Dyke Family Papers (C0276), Princeton University, Firestone Library, Princeton, 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.
On 11 December 1928, Van Dyke thanked Cather for sending the enclosure, which perfectly met his needs. He also reported that he was reading My Ántonia (1918) and felt great pleasure in imagining her spending her holiday in Nebraska.
Person Annotations
Van Dyke, Henry (1852-1933). American writer, clergyman, educator, and diplomat. Henry Van Dyke was born in Germantown, PA, the third of four children born to Henrietta and Henry Jackson Van Dyke. He graduated from Princeton University in 1873 and Princeton Theological Seminary in 1877. Van Dyke worked as a minister, a professor of English literature, and the United States Ambassador to the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Over the course of his life he published a number of popular short stories, poems, and essays, including “The Story of the Other Wise Man” (1896), “The Hymn of Joy” (1907), and “For Katrina’s Sun-Dial” (1904). Cather and Van Dyke briefly corresponded about her novel Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).
Machebeuf, Joseph P. (1812-1889). French Roman Catholic Bishop and missionary. Born in Riom, France, Joseph Machebeuf entered the seminary of Mont Ferrand, where he met fellow student Jean-Baptiste Lamy. Machebeuf was ordained in 1836 and served as a curate in Le Cendre. In 1839, Machebeuf and Lamy traveled to the U.S., where Machebeuf served as a curate in Tiffin, OH and then in 1841 as a priest in Sandusky, OH. When Lamy was appointed the head of the newly formed Vicariate of New Mexico in 1849, he appointed Machebeuf as his Vicar-General. He served as priest at Albuquerque (1853–1858) and at Santa Fe (1858–1860) before being transferred to Colorado, where he was elevated Vicar Apostolic of Colorado and Utah in 1868 and then Bishop of Denver in 1887. During their 1925 trip to New Mexico, Willa Cather and Edith Lewis became interested in the lives of Lamy and Machebeuf, and Cather based Joseph Vaillant in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) on Machebeuf.
1848Lamy, Miguel (c. 1860-1938). American laborer. Lamy was born in the Tewa Pueblo of San Ildefonso located on the Rio Grande River in northern New Mexico and was reportedly adopted by Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy when he was found injured. In 1898, Lamy married Mercedes Ramirez, with whom he had five children. For much of his life, he lived near Santa Fe, NM, working variously as a hunter, a rancher, and a salesman. In 1936, the Santa Fe New Mexican purported that Lamy inspired the character Jacinto in Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) by Willa Cather
"Letter from Willa Cather to the Editor of the Commonweal, A," Commonweal (November 27, 1927) by Willa Cather
Commonweal
