Homestead Haven

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Flying Makes the Ocean Deeper

This music score was submitted for the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library

Homestead Haven

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Yet More Cather-Knopf Correspondence

Some years ago many of us were excited by the discovery of a cache of Willa Cather’s correspondence with publisher Alfred A. Knopf that had been in the hands of Peter Prescott, one of the succession of would-be biographers of Knopf. He died before he completed it. These letters are now held in the Barbara Dobkin Collection in New York City. Before these materials came to light, researchers, including the editors of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition, had relied on a strange and fragmentary “memoir” Knopf wrote of his relationship with Cather based on his correspondence files with her, and on the more narrative essay “Miss Cather” published in The Art of Willa Cather (1973), a collection associated with the celebration of the centennial of Cather’s birth. The unpublished “memoir” went to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, but Knopf held back the correspondence files when the Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., corporate archive was donated to the Ransom Center and when he subsequently added some of his personal papers. Cather’s correspondence with Blanche Knopf was part of the donated corporate archive, but these letters provided relatively scant information about the composition and publication of Cather’s works, documenting more of their social interactions, including gift-giving to and personal services provided for a demanding author. This characterization of the Cather–Blanche Knopf correspondence at the Ransom Center vastly oversimplifies— there is correspondence about the composition and publication of Cather’s works—but Cather scholars have nevertheless tended to downplay Blanche’s importance while promoting Alfred’s. For instance, biographer James Woodress states that “Not only was Knopf her publisher, but both Alfred and Blanche Knopf, and later their son Pat, became close friends” (316). He thus categorizes Alfred as both her publisher and a friend and Blanche merely as a friend. Cather scholars have not been alone in diminishing Blanche’s importance to the publishing firm bearing only her husband’s name. As Laura P. Claridge argues in The Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire, Alfred Knopf himself, who survived Blanche Knopf by nearly two decades, was largely responsible for the diminishment of his first wife’s legacy in publishing

Review of \u3ci\u3eWilla Cather and Material Culture: Real-World Writing, Writing the Real World\u3c/i\u3e, edited by Janis P. Stout

In her essay The Novel Démeublé, American novelist Willa Cather famously protested against the over-furnished modern novel, in which material objects and their vivid presentation have overtaken artistic vision and skill. In response, she advocates throw[ing] all of the furniture out of the [novel\u27s] window, leaving behind the room bare as the stage of a Greek theatre. . In the introduction to this collection of essays and in many of the essays themselves, editor Janis Stout and the essays\u27 authors refer to and rebut Cather\u27s famous artistic manifesto through analyses of material objects in her fiction. Stout\u27s introduction frames the collection as a whole as part of an ongoing reclamation of Cather\u27s modernism and as consider[ing] her less in exceptionalist terms and more in terms of her involvement in, or even investment in, her culture.” ... As is often the case with such collections, however, the essays are of uneven quality and thematic as well as methodological coherence is weak

Review of \u3ci\u3e Social Stories: The Magazine Novel in Nineteenth-Century America\u3c/i\u3e and \u3ci\u3e Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910\u3c/i\u3e

Patricia Okker’s study of serialized novels published in nineteenth-century American magazines is elegantly conceived and executed. Beginning her chronological case studies with the serialization of Jeremy Belknap’s The Foresters (1787) in the Columbian Magazine, Okker takes as her central analytic framework the relationship between parts and whole, considering both the relationship of parts of magazine novels to the whole magazine in which they appear and the connection of individuals to the whole collectivity of American nationalism(s). The Columbian Magazine, for instance, published the U.S. Constitution alongside an installment of The Foresters, and in his novel, Belknap sought to demonstrate “the extent to which the Indians served as a common enemy to unify the disparate colonists” into the new republic (53). In the national motto of E Pluribus Unum (out of many one) that serves as an organizing principle of Okker’s study, magazines, serial novelists, and readers contest and variously define “the many” and “the one.”Applying this flexible rubric to a broad range of authors and magazines, Okker takes a truly integrated approach to nineteenth-century American literary study, addressing intelligently and subtly the works of authors who are men and women, and black and white. She compares William Gilmore Simms’s serialization of Katharine Walton in Godey’s (1850) and The Sword and the Distaff in Charleston’s Southern Literary Gazette (1852) with Martin Delaney’s serializations of two different versions of Blake in the Anglo-African Magazine (1859, 1861). This seemingly odd pairing of pro-slavery Southern nationalist with anti-slavery proto-Black nationalist discourse demonstrates how, in an increasingly segmented periodical market, Simms and Delaney attempted to forge like-minded communities of readers in critical opposition to a strong, centralized U.S. nationalism. Rebecca Harding Davis wrote both for “high” and “low” magazines, but Okker’s chapter on Davis and the function of realist fiction in the post-war period challenges the received wisdom that this created a split authorial personality. Okker finds instead that in all of her works, Davis sought to engage “national” audiences with current “national” topics. Through an analysis of Waiting for the Verdict’s publication in the Galaxy, she finds that like Simms and Delaney, Davis “shares a commitment to difference, but unlike them, she remains hopeful that such differences could be honored within a national identity” (132)

Review of Ezra Greenspan, \u3ci\u3eGeorge Palmer Putnam\u3c/i\u3e (2000) and \u3ci\u3eThe House of Putnam\u3c/i\u3e (2002)

Ezra Greenspan\u27s biography of nineteenth-century American publisher George Palmer Putnam should be of great interest to many scholars of nineteenth-century American literature, whether or not they specialize in publishing history. Among the American authors and literary figures who made significant appearances in Putnam\u27s personal and professional life and thus in this biography were: William Cullen Bryant, James and Susan Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Sophia Peabody and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Caroline Kirkland, William Gilmore Simms, James Hall, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry David Thoreau, and Susan and Anna Warner. ... Subsequent to the publication of Greenspan\u27s Putnam biography, the Gale Group published a Dictionary of Literary Biography documentary volume on The House of Putnam, edited by Greenspan. Coupled together, the biography and documentary volume represent a rare opportunity to read one scholar\u27s narrative interpretation of a publisher\u27s life, as well as many of the primary documents from which he derived that narrative

Every Week Essays: \u3ci\u3eEvery Week\u3c/i\u3e’s Editorial Staff

Every Week Magazine, published from 1915-1918, was a significant magazine phenomenon of its day, with a weekly circulation of 600,000 copies. The contents provide a rich cultural resource for those interested in the World War I home front, popular fiction, advertising, and constructions of race and gender during this period. Until the development of this digital edition, the magazine could be accessed by scholars and readers only with great difficulty due to its embrittled condition and rarity. Magazines provided courtesy of the University of Wisconsin

Every Week Essays: Associated Sunday Magazines and the Origins of \u3ci\u3eEvery Week\u3c/i\u3e

Every Week Magazine, published from 1915-1918, was a significant magazine phenomenon of its day, with a weekly circulation of 600,000 copies. The contents provide a rich cultural resource for those interested in the World War I home front, popular fiction, advertising, and constructions of race and gender during this period. Until the development of this digital edition, the magazine could be accessed by scholars and readers only with great difficulty due to its embrittled condition and rarity. Magazines provided courtesy of the University of Wisconsin