LETTERS: Knopf Correspondence.] In 6 quarter-morocco slipcases, labeled a-f.
Willa Cather—Alfred Knopf Correspondence:
“Close Personal And Friendly Bonds…
Should Hold Publisher And Author Together.”
Cather, Willa. Willa Cather—Alfred Knopf Correspondence. 1920-1940s.
A rich source of material spanning Cather’s career at Knopf, as yet untapped by biographers due to Cather’s order forbidding publication of her correspondence. Includes 202 items, 1920 through the 1940s, the complete period of Cather’s association with Knopf, broken down as follows:
162 autograph letters signed, nearly all to Alfred A. Knopf, some marked “personal,”
ranging from cards with a few lines to letters of several pages, some with photographs.
22 typed letters signed, as above.
7 letters partially autograph, partially typed, or letters to Cather with her signed
autograph replies appended.
11 telegrams.
2 letters Cather dictated by telephone.
The seminal archive also includes approximately 650 carbons from Knopf and other firm members (a few of these are on the back of Cather’s letters); letters from agents and other publishers interested in taking her over (Cather had a habit of sending these on to Knopf); copies of Cather’s letters to other publishers; a letter on the Smart Set letterhead; a letter from Archibald MacLeish, when he was Librarian of Congress in 1940, asking her for permission to make her work into talking books for the blind; a 1942 letter from Allan Nevins to Cather; her contract for Song of the Lark; Knopf firm internal memos on publishing her books.
These are letters of substance: Cather arguing about the title of One of Ours, changes in the text of her books, publicity, sales, design, anthologies, reprint rights, the death of her mother, reviews of her books, her refusal to allow film adaptations and cheap reprints of her books. There is a $10 check written by Cather in 1925 to Knopf, which he never cashed. Knopf maintained the correspondence in files by year in a metal box in home.
Provenance: Alfred Knopf’s widow Helen, to Peter S. Prescott, Knopf’s biographer, though as of January 2000 Prescott’s book remained far from complete.
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Hermione Lee describes Knopf as Cather’s professional “safe haven in the post-war years which would last her for the rest of her life,” as protection against the lackadaisical proofreading and underpromotion she had suffered at the hands of Houghton Mifflin. Though these shortcomings on the part of the publisher of Alexander’s Bridge and My Ántonia was “partly due,” Lee admits, to wartime conditions, Cather was wholly dissatisfied, and sought a change: “She admired the young publisher Alfred Knopf for his Borzoi Books; early in 1920 she walked into his office, they had a long conversation, and she asked him then and there to be her publisher.” According to Sharon O’Brien, the confidence this decision suggests was further illustrated by Cather’s decision to drop her middle name and initial from her professional identity: “At first this link with her uncle gave her name the weightiness a novice writer needed, but once her professional status was assured and she transferred from Houghton Mifflin to Knopf…she could become simply ‘Willa Cather’ on the title page” (Willa Cather: Double Lives, by Hermione Lee, New York: Pantheon Books, 1989, p. 107).
Alfred Knopf’s first Cather publication was Youth and the Bright Medusa, which collected four stories from The Troll Garden and four new stories from the late teens which had not made it into The Song of the Lark. But at the start of their association he had hoped for a novel, and when One of Ours materialized—he had convinced her to change the title from Claude—he was thrilled by its success. Though Cather remained wary that it was repeatedly misinterpreted as war propaganda, and expressed the wish that she had published it unsigned, Knopf “cited her fan letters as proof…that though the ‘highbrows’ and the ‘pacifists’ might be scornful, ordinary American readers loved it
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