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.

Barrows, Alice Prentice (1878-1954). American education reformer. Born in Lowell, MA, to Charles Dana and Marion (Merrill) Barrows, Alice Prentice Barrows graduated from Vassar College in 1900 with a degree in English. She briefly taught English at the Packer Collegiate Institute (Brooklyn, NY) and at the Ethical Culture School (Manhattan, NY) before returning to Vassar as an English instructor. In 1907, she began graduate school in the Teachers College at Columbia University and took courses with John Dewey. From 1909 to 1911, she investigated women’s working conditions in the garment industry for the Russell Sage Foundation. In the 1910s, Barrows began to focus on education reform and from 1918 to 1942, she worked for the U.S. Bureau of Education. Barrows was an associate of Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, who became friends with Cather in the early 1910s, but it is unknown if Cather and Barrows ever met.