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.

James, Henry (1843-1916). Expatriate American fiction writer and critic. Born in New York City to philosopher Henry James and Mary Robertson Walsh James, Henry, Jr., was educated in both the United States and Europe. After beginning his career in the U.S., he moved to Paris in 1875 and lived the rest of his life in Europe, primarily in England, but he also made regular extended trips to the Continent. James was influential as both a writer and a theorist of fiction and was known for fiction about Americans abroad and for representing the interior consciousness of his characters. In the Lincoln Courier in 1895, Willa Cather praised James as “that mighty master of language and keen student of human action and motives.” Cather followed James’s lead in many of her short stories of the 1890s and 1900s and in Alexander’s Bridge (1912); Witter Bynner, who worked for S. S. McClure, sent Cather’s story collection The Troll Garden (1905) to James. In “My First Novels [There Were Two],” however, Cather characterized her Jamesian phase as a false start. She never met James in person but narrowly missed meeting him at Annie Adams Fields’ summer home during his final visit to the U.S. in 1910-1911. James died in England, having renounced his American citizenship during World War I.

Hamsun, Knut (1859-1962). Norwegian writer. Born Knud Pederson to a poor family in Norway, Knut Hamsun was separated from his family when he was nine, and forced to make his own way. He began writing when he was seventeen, and published his first novel in 1877. He traveled in the U.S. for several years, publishing a book on American society in 1889. In the 1890s his books, such as Hunger (1890) and Pan (1894) were widely praised for their lyrical depictions of nature and for their psychological insights. His 1917 novel, The Growth of the Soil, won him the 1920 Nobel Prize for Literature.