Van Doren, Carl Clinton (1885-1950). American writer and critic. Born in Illinois, son of Charles L. Van Doren and Eudora Butz Van Doren, Carl graduated from the University of Illinois in 1907, and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1911. There he met fellow graduate student Irita Bradford; they married in 1912 and had three daughters before divorcing in 1935. Van Doren taught at Columbia from 1911 to 1930; he served as literary editor of the Nation (1919-1922) and the Century (1922-1925). His study, The American Novel (1920) became an influential text; an article on Cather he wrote for the Nation in 1921 was included in his Contemporary American Novelists (1922). Van Doren’s biography of Benjamin Franklin won a Pulitzer in 1939. Cather included him in invitations to tea at Bank Street and allowed him to use a chapter from The Song of the Lark in an anthology.

Wharton, Edith (1862-1937). American author. Born Edith Newbold Jones to well-to-do fashionable parents from old New York City families and educated at home, she married Edward Robbins Wharton in 1885. Unhappy in her marriage (she divorced her husband in 1913), she pursued authorship, first writing about interior decoration and travel and then short stories. The publication of The House of Mirth (1905), her second novel, marked her emergence as a major novelist and solidified an important friendship with Henry James. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence (1920). Wharton completed construction of “The Mount” in Lenox, MA, in 1902 but primarily lived in France. Critics often classed Cather and Wharton together as the best American women novelists of their time—a comparison that also appeared in promotional copy for Cather’s novels—but there is no evidence that they ever met. Cather’s occasional public statements about Wharton suggest ambivalence, as when in “My First Novels (There Were Two)” (1932) she classes Wharton with James as novelists she imitated in Alexander’s Bridge (1912).