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.

Cather, John (1892-1959) (“Jack”). Cather’s brother. Born and raised in Red Cloud, NE, Jack was the seventh child and fourth son of Charles and Virginia Cather. He was nearly two decades younger than Willa Cather, and she was a doting older sister when he was a small boy. Because she missed him after her 1896 move to Pittsburgh, PA, she wrote several poems about him and the story “Jack-a-Boy” (1901). After graduating from Red Cloud High School in 1912, Jack studied for two years at University of Nebraska in Lincoln. With Willa Cather’s encouragement, in 1914 he enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh to study engineering. Willa Cather was then living in New York City but traveled to Pittsburgh to help him settle in and enjoyed visiting him and supported his decision to change his major to theater. It is not clear whether he graduated from Carnegie Tech but the British government trained him as a chemist so he could inspect munitions factories. While working in Smethport, PA, he met Irma Wells, and they married in 1918. They had two children, Catherine and Ella Faye. After World War I, he worked as a chemical engineer in the oil industry in Cincinnati, OH, Casper, WY, and Bradford, PA. In 1936 he moved to Whittier, CA, and became a business partner with his brothers Douglass and James in an oil production company. He died in Long Beach, CA. Willa Cather mentions him frequently in letters, but she seems to have had little contact with him and his family in later years, and no letters from her to him have surfaced.

Fremstad, Olive (1871-1951). Swedish-American opera singer. Born in Sweden, Ann Olivia Rundquist was adopted by a Scandinavian-American couple, the Fremstads, who raised her first in Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway, and then in Minnesota. She moved to New York City to study piano in 1890 and then to Germany to study voice with Lilli Lehmann. After a successful career in Europe as a mezzo-soprano, she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1903, where she specialized in singing soprano roles in operas by Richard Wagner. Willa Cather first met Fremstad in 1913 while researching “Three American Singers,” an article for McClure’s Magazine in which Cather clearly prefers Fremstad as “the most interesting kind of American” over Geraldine Farrar and Louise Homer. Through 1916 Cather and Fremstad were in close and regular contact in person and through letters, although Cather’s letters to Fremstad have not been located and their friendship evidently cooled. Fremstad inspired many aspects of the story, personality, and career of Thea Kronborg, heroine of The Song of the Lark (1915), and she approved of the novel, although Cather did not want readers to identify the character too closely with her. Fremstad married and divorced twice. During the period Cather and Fremstad were in regular contact Fremstad lived as a couple with Mary Watkins (later Cushing) who, after Fremstad’s death, published a biography of her, The Rainbow Bridge (1954).

Flahant, Mme. Friend of Cather and Belgian refugee. There is insufficient evidence for a definitive identification, but a Mrs. M. Flahant arrived in New York City on the S.S. Olympic on 24 September 1913.