Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Willa Cather, corrected again

In its initial magazine publication, Willa Cather’s story “Two Friends” made reference to a “transit of Venus.” William Lyon Phelps of Yale University wrote to tell Cather that she was in fact describing an occultation of Venus. On July 30, 1932, Cather sent a telegram to her publisher Alfred A. Knopf:

CHANGE TRANSIT TO OCCULTATION STOP I SAW IT WHATEVER IT WAS

WILLA CATHER

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).
“Two Friends,” with the proper occultation, appears in Cather’s Obscure Destinies (1932).

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

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