Dwight, Harrison Griswold (1875-1959). American writer and diplomat. Dwight was born in Constantinople, Turkey, to a missionary family. His early education was abroad, but he graduated from Amherst College in Amherst, MA, in 1898. He joined the consular service and later worked as a translator during World War I. Cather apparently met him in 1906 in connection with editorial work at McClure’s Magazine. Cather and Dwight occasionally met socially; he apparently also knew Cather’s Pittsburgh friends, Mary and May Willard. Her letters often report her reactions to his work, including Stamboul Nights (1916), which drew on his experience in the Middle East.

Adams, Georgine Milmine Welles (1874-1950). Canadian-American journalist. Born in Ontario, Canada, Georgine Milmine was the editor of the women’s page of the Syracuse (NY) Herald in 1905 when she married the newspaper’s managing editor, Benjamin Welles. From c. 1903 to 1906, she researched the life of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and sold her exposé of Eddy to McClure’s Magazine. Burton Hendrick, Will Irwin, Willa Cather, and others on the magazine’s staff verified her research, conducted additional research, and collaboratively rewrote Milmine’s account before it appeared under Milmine’s name in McClure’s from January 1907 to June 1908. After Benjamin Welles’ 1911 death, Georgine married Arthur Adams, with whom she moved to Falmouth, MA, in 1937. She and her second husband are buried in Auburn, NY, where they lived at the time of their marriage.

Hendrick, Burton Jesse (1870-1949). American magazine writer, editor, and biographer. Hendrick graduated from Yale in 1895 and worked as a newspaper journalist until 1905, when he became a staff writer at McClure’s Magazine. Cather blamed him for errors in the first serialized installment in McClure’s of a biographical exposé of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. In 1913 Hendrick became associate editor of the World’s Work, a public affairs magazine founded by Walter Hines Page. Having won the Pulitzer Prize in biography as co-author of Victory at Sea (1921) and author of The Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page (1922), he left the magazine in 1927 to pursue writing biographies and histories, winning a third Pulitzer for a follow-up Page biography. Doubleday, Page, and Company, of which Walter Page was a partner, published all of Hendrick’s books.

Irwin, William Henry (1873-1948) (“Will”). American journalist. Born in Oneida, New York, Will Irwin grew up in Colorado, and after a year as a cowboy, he attended Stanford University, graduating in 1899. He became a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1901, then moved to New York in 1904 to work for the New York Sun. His book, The Picaroons co-authored with humorist Gelett Burgess, was published by McClure, Phillips in 1904. S. S. McClure hired Irwin as managing editor of McClure’s Magazine in 1906; he wrote some muckraking articles and also helped assemble materials for the articles on Christian Science which Cather would later write up. He left McClure’s to write for Collier’s and other magazines, and went to Europe as a correspondent on the outbreak of World War I. In 1916 he married writer and suffragist Inez Haynes Gilmore. Irwin wrote a variety of books after the war, including fiction (a few made into movies), biographies, and history.

Sullivan, Mark (1874-1952). American journalist. Mark Sullivan was born in Avondale, PA, to Julia Gleason and Cornelius Sullivan. Sullivan began attending Harvard University in 1896, earning an AB and a law degree in 1903. While attending school Sullivan published a number of articles in the Boston Evening Transcript, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Phoenixville Republican, which he co-owned with fellow reporter John Miller. Over the course of his 64-year long career, he worked at a wide range of newspapers, including McClure’s Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, Colliers, the New York Evening Post, and the New York Herald-Tribune. Sullivan frequently collaborated with Cather during his time as a staff writer at McClure’s Magazine from 1905 to 1906.

Kipling, Rudyard (1865-1936). English fiction writer and poet. Born in Bombay, India, to English parents, Kipling was sent to England for his education but returned to India to work as a journalist. His poems and short stories about India won him an audience in England, and he settled in London in 1889. When he married Caroline Balestier in 1892, the couple moved to her home state of Vermont. In 1896 Willa Cather claimed to have met Kipling and she described the “46 minutes” of conversation with him as “alone worth” her move to Pittsburgh to work for the Home Monthly (#0028). In 1899, Cather wrote a column about his career for the Lincoln Courier, in which she noted the irony of Kipling trying to “live a respectable Puritan life in Vermont and be a full-fledged family man,” urging him to “Go back east.” In 1899, he did leave the U.S., but for London, not India, where he remained the rest of his life. McClure’s Magazine published Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) and the novel Kim (1900-1901), paying him $25,000 for serialization of the latter. When Cather traveled to London on McClure’s business in 1909, she carried a letter of introduction to him, but it is not clear whether she met him again there. Throughout her life Cather expressed enthusiasm for Kipling’s works, which she associated with a spirit of adventure, and her letters make clear that she followed his life and career closely.

Willard, Elisa May (1868-1941) (“May”). Librarian; Cather’s Pittsburgh friend. Born in Vermont, Willard graduated from Smith College in 1894, attended the New York State Library School from 1894-1895, and then moved to Pittsburgh to work at the Carnegie Library, where she served as Reference Librarian for twenty-two years. May Willard, Ethel Litchfield, Isabelle McClung, and Cather formed, as she wrote in a condolence letter to May’s sister Mary, a “little group” that “melted together” (#1540). Willard retired in 1917 and moved to California. Although only one letter from Cather to Willard is extant, they remained friends, and Willard visited Cather in New York City. She died in San Francisco, CA.

Willard, Mary (1857-1944) (“Marie”). Elisa May Willard’s sister. Born in Vermont, Mary Willard lived, for a time, in Pittsburgh, PA, with her sister Elisa May Willard, Willa Cather’s close friend during her years in the city; however, it is not clear whether Mary lived in Pittsburgh before Cather’s move to New York City in 1906. The sisters later moved to California. Mary died in San Francisco, CA.

Reynolds, Paul Revere (1864-1944). American literary agent. Born in Boston, MA, Reynolds earned a BA from Harvard University in 1887 and an M.A in 1891, studying under William James. In the wake of the International Copyright Act of 1891, he became the U.S. agent for the English publisher Cassell, later undertaking similar work for other British publishers, He then began representing individual authors seeking to place fiction with magazines and book publishers, taking a ten per cent commission. Reynolds placed fiction in McClure’s Magazine when Cather was an editor there. Cather first allowed him to act as her own agent in 1916, placing “The Diamond Mine” in McClure’s. She was very pleased with the price he secured for the story, expressing “the greatest satisfaction in his conduct of affairs” (#0361). For the next decade, she allowed him to place short stories and serialize her novels in magazines, although not consistently. After the serialization of Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) in the Forum, she consistently put off his queries about what she was writing, and he was evidently surprised by the publication of “Neighbor Rosicky” in the Woman’s Home Companion (1930). Cather assured him that she still wanted to work with him, but either she herself or staff at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., arranged magazine publication of her remaining fiction.