27 August 1937

Miss Willa Cather
570 Park Avenue
New York City

Dear Miss Cather:

A few days ago I received a letter
from Knopf's informing me that it was impossible to
grant permission to use anything from DEATH COMES FOR
THE ARCHBISHOP in the OXFORD ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN
LITERATURE which I am editing with William Rose Benet.
Such a decision naturally disturbs me, for after re-
studying your work it had seemed to me that the sec-
tion called "Missionary Journeys" best fitted into
the general scheme of contemporary American prose which
I had hoped to present. With it, in order that its
artistic purpose should be properly understood, I had
also hoped to reprint a paragraph from your communi-
cation to THE COMMONWEAL.

Though the matter may be entirely
within Knopf's jurisdiction, I am appealing to you
for a reversal of their edict. The problem of an
historical anthologist is not an easy one. He is
asked, as I have been, not to prepare a bedside book,
but to survey American literature from the beginning
of the seventeenth century and to present what is, in
his opinion, the best prose and poetry which Americans
have produced. He wants, naturally, to reflect his
own opinion in order that the anthology may have a cer-
tain structure of its own.

No author is, I suppose, quite free
from the dangers resulting from the prejudices of
critics or anthologists, or none undisturbed by what
appears to be an undue emphasis upon certain aspects
of his work. It is possibly a natural consequence of
having achieved something uniquely and perfectly. It
is not because I think DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
is the only fine book you have written that I had
chosen the section I did, but rather because it is a
type of writing which I find no one else to have done
so well. The selection seems also to me particularly
suited to being read apart from the book as a whole
---one of the criteria of selection which I could not
meet, for example, in anything I might choose from
THE LOST LADY or even from MY ANTONIA.

In the use of material from DEATH
COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP I cannot quite persuade my-
self that the sale of the volume itself will in any
way be hurt, for through Knopf and the Modern Library
it is already widely known in America. If the denial
of permission, however, arises from a feeling on your
part that the choice is unfair, I should be most
grateful for any indication from you as to how my
selection might be bettered. I have been enormously
pleased that the Oxford Press is at last taking a
real interest in the literature of Americans, and, t
the editors notwithstanding, this belated recognition
deserves all we can do to make it successful.

I know you will understand and par-
don my intrusion into your privacy.

Very sincerely yours,

147 Cottage Street
New Haven, Connecticut

W·S·C·

October 23, 1937.

My dear Mr. Pearson:

I wish I could oblige you in the matter of furnishing you proofs
of the revised edition of DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP. I cannot do so,
but I think you can make some arrangement with Mr. Ferris Greenslet, of
Houghton Mifflin, if you write to him personally and explain to him fully
why you need the proofs of that portion of the book.

When I was editing that book I made all the corrections on the
margins of pages, and I did not read the proofs when the book was reset for
the new edition. In some of the books, where the changes were very
extensive, I did read proofs and revised proofs. But in DEATH COMES FOR
THE ARCHBISHOP the changes were not extensive; chiefly changes of words and
punctuation. The new text of the book is certainly better than the
original text, in which there were a good many typographical errors. If
you ask Mr. Greenslet to supply you with proofs of the new edition, I think
he will do so if it is at all possible. I would suggest that you send him
a copy of the *prose selections for the anthology*, as I think that would have
some weight with him, as it did with Mr. Knopf and myself. He would
realize then that your anthology is not to be a helter-skelter collection.

May I add that I think the selections in poetry extremely good?
As to the prose selections, I wish you might have done a little better by Poe.
Isn't the CASK OF AMONTILLADÉ a rather better story than the FALL OF THE HOUSE
OF USHER? Of course, in this story, too, the theatrical element is present,

26 October 1937

Dear Miss Cather;

You have my gratitude again. I
shall get in touch with Greenslet, and attempt to
arrange the matter with him. At the moment his firm
and I are jousting over the matter of whether I am
to be permitted to print more than two poems of any
poet whose copyright they hold. Poor Amy Lowell!
When she remarked that she made herself a poet and
that God made her a business woman, she could never
have guessed how hard I also should have to try even
to make her appear a poet. Her publishers have taken
over God's function. Probably I shall delay any re-
quest for this new favor until this matter has been
settled, but will then make every possible effort to
persuade them to let me use the revised version.
They are naturally reluctant to do anything to help
any book published by a competitor, but perhaps they
can be brought around to see that an author ought to
be represented by his best.

I was delighted that you liked the
selections of poetry. It seems to me perfectly pos-
sible to arrange an adequate anthology of poetry; I
wish I could feel the same way about prose. So many
considerations come into play, aside even from the
overwhelming problem of space. The selections from
the prose of certain nineteenth-century writers are
ponderous and over-generous. That was forced on me;
though I hope to better this if the English edition
is reset. So was the selection of Poe's FALL OF THE
HOUSE OF USHER not entirely my doing. But I am
grateful to you for having made the suggestion of his
CASK OF AMONTILLADO. I should say that in many ways
this story, his TELL-TALE HEART, and THE PURLOINED