Ferrero, Guglielmo (1871-1942). Italian historian and writer. Born near Naples, Italy, Ferrero studied law but was drawn to political and classical studies. In 1901 he married Gina Lombroso, daughter of Cesare Lombroso, a well-known psychiatrist and criminologist with whom Ferrero collaborated on some early works. Ferrero’s five-volume history of Rome was translated into English from 1907 to 1909 and made his reputation in the English-speaking world. On a 1908 visit to the U.S., Theodore Roosevelt invited him to the White House. Cather corresponded with him while she was an editor at McClure’s Magazine, soliciting articles from him which were published in April and May of 1909. The fascist regime in Italy placed him under house arrest in 1925, but in 1930 he and his family escaped to Switzerland.

Tarbell, Ida Minerva (1875-1944). American “muckraking” journalist and biographer. Ida Tarbell was born on a farm in Erie County, PA. When her father entered the oil business the family moved to the rough Pennsylvania oil region city of Rouseville for several years before settling in Titusville. Tarbell graduated from Alleghany College in 1880 and briefly taught in Ohio before earning an MA from Alleghany and going to work for the Chautaquan magazine. After three years editing and writing for the magazine, she spent three years in Paris, France, studying history at the Sorbonne. On her 1893 return to the U.S., she was hired by McClure’s to write a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, then moving on to Abraham Lincoln as a subject, about whom she would write periodically for decades. She is best known for her next work for McClure’s, The History of the Standard Oil Company (serialized 1902-1904). Conflicts with S. S. McClure led her to depart McClure’s in 1906 with fellow writers Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker to found the competing American Magazine, where she worked until 1915. Thereafter, she made her living as a free-lance writer. When Cather arrived at McClure’s in spring 1906, Tarbell was still working there. Despite Tarbell’s imminent planned departure, the two women became friendly enough that Tarbell invited Cather to visit the farm she had recently bought in Connecticut and where her mother and sister lived with her. It is not clear how frequently Cather and Tarbell saw each other in subsequent years but they kept in touch, and Cather contributed to Tarbell’s efforts to support S. S. McClure financially. Tarbell died in Bridgeport, CT, and is buried in Titusville.

McClure, Samuel Sidney (1857-1949) (“S.S.”). Irish-born American publisher. McClure immigrated to the U.S. at age nine, living with his family in Indiana. Despite poverty and the limited education he had received in Ireland, he graduated from high school and then Knox College in Illinois. He then moved to Boston, MA, where from 1882 to 1884 he edited the Wheelman, a bicycling magazine. Despite opposition from her parents, he married his Knox College classmate Harriet Hurd in 1883. The couple had four biological children (Eleanor, Bess, Mary, and Robert), and adopted one (Enrico). In 1884, S.S. started McClure’s Syndicate, which placed fiction in newspapers across the country. In 1893 with his college classmate John Sanborn Phillips he started McClure's Magazine, which was best-known for the "muckraking" exposés by writers such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens, but which also published literature. After his cousin H.H. McClure, who worked for the McClure Syndicate, brought Cather to S.S. McClure’s attention, McClure, Phillips & Co. brought out Cather’s first book of fiction, The Troll Garden (1905). When most of the editorial staff, including Steffens and Tarbell, resigned from McClure’s in 1906, he hired Cather as an editor; she later became managing editor. After she left her position at McClure’s in 1912 and when S. S. McClure had lost control of the magazine still bearing his name, Cather ghost wrote his autobiography (McClure’s serial 1913-1914, book publication 1914). McClure made repeated—and ultimately failed—attempts to reestablish himself in journalism and magazine publishing, often trying to enlist Cather in these enterprises. She almost went with him to Europe in 1915 to report on the war for the Evening Mail, and she remained personally loyal to her mercurial and often-irresponsible former employer. He served as the prototype for Marcus O’Mally, editor of the Outcry, in her story “Ardessa” (1918), and it has been suggested that Cather modeled the courtship and marriage between Myra and Oswald Henshaw in My Mortal Enemy (1926) on that of the McClures.