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.

Austin, Mary Hunter (1868-1934). American author and critic. Born in Carlinville, IL, Mary Hunter received a BS from Blackburn College in 1888, the same year she moved with her mother and siblings to California’s San Joaquin Valley. In 1891 she married Stafford Wallace Austin. In 1903, they separated (they divorced in 1915) and her collection of California desert stories, The Land of Little Rain, appeared. Between 1903 and 1924, Austin spent periods of time in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City; London, England; and Carmel, CA; however, most of her literary output continued to focus on the deserts of California and the Southwest. Cather may have met Austin as early as 1910, and Austin’s poetry appeared in McClure’s Magazine in 1911 and 1912. In February 1919 Austin wrote Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin, their mutual publisher, praising My Ántonia (1918) and asking for additional information and materials to write an appreciation of Cather for El Palacio, a magazine published in Santa Fe, NM; her essay appeared in 1920. When Cather and Edith Lewis travelled to the Southwest in 1925, they saw Austin in New Mexico, where she had built Casa Querida in Santa Fe in 1924. When Cather returned in 1926 to continue research and writing of Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Austin offered her the use of her empty house to work in. Cather inscribed a copy of Archbishop “For Mary Austin, in whose lovely study I wrote the last chapters of this book,” but she began denying that she had written any part of the novel in Casa Querida after Austin published Earth Horizon (1932), in which she called Cather’s celebration of French missionary priests a “calamity” for Southwestern culture. Austin died at home two years later.

Abbott, Edith (1876-1957). Social reformer and educator. Edith Abbott was born in Grand Island, NE. After graduating from the University of Nebraska in 1901, she earned a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1905. She lived at Hull House from 1908 to 1920, and became dean of the College of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago from 1924 to 1942. Like her sister Grace Abbott, Edith Abbott worked for legislation to improve the lot of immigrants, women, and children. Abbott and Cather were both awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Nebraska in Lincoln in 1917.

Alighieri, Dante (1265-1321). Italian poet and philosopher. Born in Florence, Italy, Dante Alighieri was a poet, philosopher and political thinker who is best known for his epic poem The Divine Comedy. Willa Cather frequently referenced Dante’s work in both her letters and fiction, particularly in My Ántonia (1918) and short fiction including “A Death in the Desert,” “El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional,” and “On the Divide.”