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.

Tooker, Harry Leigh (1873-1950). American laborer. Born in Chicago, IL, Tooker married Amanda Hull in Santa Monica, CA, in 1899 and their daughter, Helen, was born in 1900. In 1901, Tooker was believed to have drowned after he disappeared and his bicycle was found floating in the sea, but he faked his own death and was sued for divorce on grounds of desertion in 1908. By 1912, Tooker was working in Winslow, AZ, for the Santa Fe Railroad, rooming with Douglass Cather, Willa Cather's brother. He joined Cather and her brother as they toured Walnut Canyon in 1912. Though Cather was often annoyed by his pretentiousness, she enjoyed camping and exploring with him and reported that he had an interesting history prospecting in South America and Mexico. By 1918, Tooker was working as a prospector in Grand Canyon, AZ; by 1920, he was working in an oil field near DeLeon, TX. In 1925, Tooker moved to Monrovia, CA, and joined the police department. He married Mildred Wardell in 1928, and she died in 1930. Less than a week after her death, Tooker lost his job as a police officer after shooting at a car and trying to strike the chief of police. By 1940, Tooker was listed in the census as "living in car" in a Los Angeles, CA, suburb. He died in Bakersfield, CA, in 1950. Tooker is an inspiration for Cather's character Ray Kennedy in The Song of the Lark (1915), and after the novel was published he sent Cather an appreciative letter about it.

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.”

Flaubert, Gustave (1821-1880). French novelist. Born in Rouen, France, son and grandson of physicians and surgeons, Gustave Flaubert began writing at an early age. He traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East but lived primarily in Rouen with his mother and orphaned niece, Caroline Flaubert. Flaubert was devoted to his craft, taking five years to write Madame Bovary (1856) and seven to write L’Education sentimentale (1869). His precision in observation as well as in style established modern literary realism. Even his historical novels, such as Salammbó (1864), set in ancient Carthage, reflect his meticulous attention to every detail. Willa Cather read Flaubert’s works from her youth.

Tennyson, Alfred (1809-1892). British poet. Born in Somersby, England, and educated at Cambridge University, Tennyson's first solo book of poetry was published in 1830, and he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1850, serving until his death. He was married to Emily Sellwood, and the couple had two sons. Tennyson was a very productive writer, publishing many books of poetry and drama, and several of his poems are among the most well-known in the English language, including "The Charge of the Light Brigade," "Ulysses," and In Memorium A.H.H. Cather was familiar with Tennyson's work from a young age and regularly quoted or referenced it in her writings.

Mackenzie, Cameron (1882 -1921). American magazine editor and journalist. Born in Wilkes-Barre, PA, Cameron Mackenzie graduated from the Lawrenceville School, which his father founded, and studied at Yale University for a year before enrolling in the New York University Law School, from which he graduated in 1907. In 1907 he also married Elizabeth McClure, daughter of S. S. McClure. His father-in-law put him on the editorial staff of McClure’s Magazine, where he worked with Cather. In 1912 he and Frederick Collins wrested control of the magazine from S. S. McClure. Mackenzie resigned from McClure’s in 1915, subsequently writing two novels and serving as a correspondent for the London Morning Post during World War I. He died unexpectedly of pneumonia on board the Cunard liner Aquitania shortly after the ship departed London for New York City.