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.

Keeble, Glendinning (1887-1947). American teacher and critic. Glendinning Keeble was born and reared in Pittsburgh, PA, and studied music in New York City and Paris, France. Returning to Pittsburgh, he became art and music critic for the Pittsburgh Times Gazette while still in his early 20s. In 1914 he became lecturer in music and music history in the College of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He continued to write for the newspaper and in 1937 became director of the College of Fine Arts. Cather probably did not know him while she lived in Pittsburgh but may have met him later through Isabelle McClung. She asked him to critique the musical portions of The Song of the Lark (1915) for accuracy.

Jewett, Sarah Orne (1849-1909). American short story writer and novelist. Born in South Berwick, ME, Jewett began sharing homes in Boston (at 148 Charles Street) and Manchester-on-the-Sea, MA, with Annie Adams Fields in 1881, while continuing to live in her family home in South Berwick with her mother and sister part of the year. She was associated throughout her career with the Atlantic Monthly, and her best-known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, was serialized there in 1896. Like much of her fiction, it focused on rural and small town New England life. By the time Cather met Jewett at 148 Charles Street in 1908, Jewett had largely ceased writing because of a spinal concussion she suffered in a 1902 carriage accident. She wrote important letters of advice to Cather in 1908, criticizing her decision to write "The Gull's Road" (1908) from the perspective of a male character, which she called "something of a masquerade" (27 Nov. 1908), and urging her to give up her editorial work at McClure's Magazine so she could focus full-time on fiction writing (13 Dec. 1908). After Jewett's death in South Berwick in 1909, Cather often referred to her and her advice about writing. Cather edited The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925) for publisher Houghton Mifflin, and in her preface classed The Country of the Pointed Firs with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as one of "three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life."

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.

Kurt, Melanie (1880-1941) Austrian soprano. Born in Vienna, Austria, Melanie Kurt studied piano and voice as a young woman. In 1902, she debuted as Elisabeth in Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser in Lübeck, Germany. By 1910, she began touring throughout Europe and gained international notoriety. On 1 February 1915, she performed as Isolde in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera, thus beginning her three-year residence in New York City. She also performed as Leonore in Beethoven’s Fidelio on three separate occasions during the 1915 season: 3 March, 16 April, and 22 April. Cather possibly attended one or more of these performances. When Wagner’s operas fell out of favor due to anti-German sentiment during World War I, Kurt returned to Europe where she continued to sing and teach voice.