Mencken, Henry Louis (1880-1956) ("H. L."). American author, editor, and journalist. Born in Baltimore, MD, into a German immigrant family, Henry Louis Mencken worked in his father’s cigar factory for two years after graduating high school. At age eighteen he became a cub reporter for the Baltimore Herald, rising quickly through the journalistic ranks while also publishing poetry and short stories in national magazines. He became literary editor of the Smart Set magazine in 1909, later becoming co-editor with George Jean Nathan, while continuing to be a prolific and bold social and literary critic. He and Nathan founded the American Mercury magazine in 1923. Mencken reviewed many of Cather’s novels, and she began corresponding with him about her work early in her career as a novelist. Her stories “Her Boss” (1919) and “Coming, Eden Bower!” (1920) appeared in the Smart Set, and from 1920 Cather and Mencken shared Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., as a publisher (Mencken was a close personal friend of both Alfred and Blanche Knopf). Mencken was one of the strongest voices in favor of My Ántonia (1918), and Alfred Knopf commissioned him to write an appreciation of Cather for The Borzoi 1920; however, Cather’s attempt to manage his response to One of Ours (1922) by writing him in advance of publication and soliciting a review failed—Mencken wrote one of the most stingingly negative reviews of it. Mencken fell out of public favor in the early 1930s but became popular again with the publication of his fourth revision of The American Language in 1936, which he continued to revise for the rest of his life. He spent the final years of his life unable to write or speak as the result of a massive stroke in 1948.

Tolstoy, Leo (1828-1910). Russian writer and philosopher. Born south of Tula, Russia, into an aristocratic family, Tolstoy served in the army in the Crimean War. His experiences there and during travels in Europe afterwards led him to philosophical and Christian anarchism. In 1861 he married Sofia Andreyevna Behrs, with whom he had thirteen children. She worked with Tolstoy on his novels War and Peace (1873) and Anna Karenina (1877) as secretary and copyist, but the marriage became increasingly unhappy. Tolstoy also came to espouse the economic theories of Henry George, incorporating them into his novel, Resurrection (1899). Cather began reading Tolstoy in her youth and considered him one of the greatest novelists.

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).