Undset, Sigrid (1882-1949). Norwegian novelist. Undset is best known for her historical novels set in medieval Norway, the Kristin Lavrandsdatter trilogy (1920-22), set in the fourteenth-century, The Master of Hestvikin tetralogy (1925-27), set in the thirteenth century. Early in her career she wrote realistic novels set in contemporary Norway, including Jenny (1911) about a woman painter. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928 and continued to publish novels, set both in contemporary and historical Norway, that reflected her conversion to Catholicism. Undset persuaded her Norwegian publisher to issue her sister Signe Undset Thomas’s translation of Lucy Gayheart (1935) (the only Norwegian translation of Cather’s work to appear before her death). A strong critic of the German Reich, Undset made a dramatic escape from Norway over the arduous land route when the Nazis invaded Norway in April 1940, events she later described in Return to the Future (1942). When Undset reached New York City in the fall of 1940, Alfred Knopf, Cather and Undset’s mutual publisher, arranged their first meeting. They had long been enthusiastic readers of each other’s novels and were evidently established correspondents, although their extant correspondence begins in 1940. During her exile Undset settled in a residential hotel in Brooklyn Heights, and she and Cather saw each other socially. Cather praised her as “just all a great woman should be - and on a giant scale” (#1541). Undset was an active public critic of the Nazis during her exile. She returned to Norway at the close of the war in 1945 and died there.

Thomas, Dorothy (1898-1990). American writer. Born in Kansas, to Willard Thomas and Augusta Dodge Thomas, Dorothy Thomas attended Cotner College and the University of Nebraska but did not graduate from either. From 1918 to 1929 she taught elementary and secondary school. In 1928 she quit teaching to pursue a writing career after Scribner’s published her story, “The Blue Doves.” By 1975, over 150 of her short stories had appeared in publications like American Mercury, The New Yorker, and Harpers. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. published two of Thomas’s novels, Ma Jeeter’s Girls (1931) and The Home Place (1934). Willa Cather read The Home Place and criticized its “Dull, plodding, lifeless prose” (#2687).

Knopf, Alfred, Jr. (1918-2009) (“Pat”). Publisher; son of Alfred and Blanche Knopf. Born in White Plains, NY, “Pat” was the only child of Alfred and Blanche Knopf. Preoccupied with the publishing business of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., they left him to be cared for by nannies and sent him to Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite boarding school in New Hampshire. Willa Cather was very fond of him and corresponded with him about his reading and education. When he failed to gain entrance to Princeton University, he ran away with only $15 in his pocket, and his parents found him in Salt Lake City, UT. Alfred Knopf shared this story, otherwise treated as a deep family secret, with Cather. Pat subsequently enrolled in Union College in Schenectady, NY. He wrote asking Cather about the structure of The Professor’s House (1925), and she permitted Burgess Johnson, Pat’s English professor at Union, to publish her remarks as “When I wrote The Professor’s House” in the College English Association newsletter (1938). Pat’s studies were interrupted when he was called up for military service in 1941; he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Awarded his BA in 1943 he joined the family business, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1946 as company secretary and trade books manager, subsequently becoming vice president of sales and establishing the Vintage Books paperback imprint. He cofounded the Atheneum imprint in 1960 and retired as a senior vice-president of Macmillan in 1988.