Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley (1881-1965). American journalist and author. Born and raised in Winchester, MA, a suburb of Boston, Elizabeth Sergeant graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1903. In 1910, Pauline Goldmark sent her to Cather at McClure’s Magazine with a proposed article, published as “Toilers of the Tenements,” and Cather and Sergeant became lifelong friends. In 1914 Sergeant became one of the original contributors to the New Republic. While on assignment in France in 1917 she was injured by a land mine; her injury and recuperation were the subject of Shadow-Shapes: Journal of a Wounded Woman (1920). She moved to New Mexico in 1920 and became involved with the Taos artists colony and advocated for Native American rights, but her work frequently took her back to New York City. She included Cather in her collection of portraits of prominent Americans, Fire under the Andes (1927). Sergeant studied with Carl Jung and Toni Woolf in Zurich, Switzerland, from 1929 to 1931. When she returned to the U.S. she sold her house in New Mexico and settled in New York City, writing many magazine articles about authors and psychological topics. She later moved to Rockland County, NY. Cather’s letters to Sergeant comment frequently on both her own and Sergeant’s writing and testify to a strong and lively friendship maintained despite Sergeant's being a committed reformer and far to the left of Cather politically and culturally. Sergeant’s Willa Cather: A Memoir (1953) includes extensive paraphrases of Cather’s letters to her.

Hambourg, Isabelle McClung (1877-1938). Cather’s longtime friend. Cather met Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a socially prominent, Pittsburgh (PA) family, in 1899 in the dressing room of actress Lizzie Hudson Collier. McClung seems to have been the first woman to reciprocate Cather’s romantic affections. In 1901, McClung invited Cather to live in her family’s large home in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. She and Cather traveled together to Europe in 1902, and McClung accompanied Cather on a visit home to Nebraska in 1905. After Cather moved to New York City in 1906, she frequently visited McClung in Pittsburgh, finding the familiar house a congenial place to write, and McClung visited New York City, staying with Cather and Edith Lewis. Cather and McClung also rented a vacation cabin in Cherry Valley, NY, in 1911, and traveled together to Virginia in 1913. In late 1915, shortly after the death of her father, Judge Samuel McClung, Isabelle announced her intention to marry violinist Jan Hambourg. Cather reacted negatively to the marriage (which took place in 1916) but eventually reconciled herself to it, enjoying long visits with the Hambourgs in Toronto, Ontario, in 1921 and France in 1923 and 1935. Cather and Edith Lewis also spent time with the Hambourgs in Paris is 1930 and 1935. The latter trip occurred after Isabelle sought treatment in the U.S. for the kidney disease that killed her several years later in Italy. Her death came only four months after Cather’s brother Douglass died, leaving her feeling bereft. “No other living person cared as much about my work, through thirty-eight years,” she wrote her brother Roscoe (#2137). After Isabelle’s death, Jan sent to Cather the six hundred letters from Cather to Isabelle in his possession, and Cather destroyed them, although a few letters from Isabelle and Cather postcards to Isabelle are extant.

Balzac, Honoré de (1799-1850). French novelist and playwright. Born in France to an aspiring artisan and merchant class family, Balzac studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and then trained as a lawyer. Despite pressure from his family, he gave up law to pursue authorship, first writing plays and then novels. His first great success was La Comédie Humaine, a series of stories, novels, and essays ultimately running to ninety-one volumes and encompassing French society from the early through mid nineteenth-century. Balzac was a formative figure in the French realist tradition, and Cather referred to him frequently in her journalistic writings, criticism, fiction, and letters. In The Song of the Lark (1915), Dr. Archie has many volumes of Balzac in his library, telling Thea Kronborg that “A Frenchman undertook to write about a whole cityful of people, all the kinds he knew,” and characterizes the result “interesting.” In her essay “The Novel Démeublé” (1922), however, Cather dismissed Balzac’s attempt “to reproduce the actual city of Paris” as “unworthy of an artist.”

Michelet, Jules (1798-1874). French historian.

Pinker, James Brand (1862-1922). British literary agent. Born in London, England, James B. Pinker worked as a journalist, a publisher’s reader, and an editor before setting up as a literary agent around 1896. He had many distinguished clients, including artists, illustrators, and dramatists, as well as writers such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad. In 1888 he married Mary Elizabeth Seabrooke, daughter of a wealthy brewer; they had a daughter and two sons, who carried on the business for some years after his death. Cather corresponded with Pinker when she worked at McClure’s.