Lowell, Amy (1874-1925). American poet, critic, and lecturer. Born into a wealthy and aristocratic family in Brookline, MA, Amy Lowell was educated at home and in boarding schools. After her debut in 1891, she continued a rigorous course of self study in her father’s enormous library and became an avid book and manuscript collector, especially of materials by or relating to British Romantic poet John Keats. Lowell began writing poetry in 1902; her first book of poetry, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, appeared in 1912, the same year she met actress Ada Dwyer Russell, who left the stage to share with her the grand Lowell family estate, Sevenels. On a visit to Annie Fields in Boston, MA, around 1912 or 1913, Willa Cather accompanied Professor George Woodberry of Columbia University to Sevenels to view Lowell’s Keatsiana; the details of the visit are in dispute, but it did not go well. In 1914 Lowell traveled to England to meet Ezra Pound and to learn about free verse and imagism, the poetic movement he founded, but they soon came into conflict when she assumed a leading role. Lowell was a prolific poet and popularizer of modern verse, traveling widely to lecture and read her poetry. What’s O’Clock (1925), edited by Russell, was published after her death from a cerebral hemorrhage and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Improbably, in 1928 Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin asked Cather to write a short biography of Lowell; she declined.

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.