White, William Allen (1868-1944). American newspaper editor and fiction writer. As the editor and publisher of the Emporia Gazette, White had an audience and influence far beyond the small town of Emporia, KS. He married Sallie Lindsay in 1893 and they bought the Gazette in 1895, with his wife working with him on all aspects of producing the paper. His fiery anti-Populist editorial “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”, published during the 1896 presidential campaign, made his national reputation, although his politics later shifted from his early conservative Republicanism. Dubbed the “Sage of Emporia” by H.L. Mencken for his widely reprinted editorials, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for an editorial advocating free speech. He began publishing short stories about small-town life in the 1890s, including in McClure’s Magazine; Cather later remembered reading his “Court of Boyville” stories with her brother Roscoe and marveling that a man from Kansas had been able to publish them in McClure’s (#2242). White stopped writing fiction after the failure of his novel In the Heart of a Fool (1918), however. In the Nation Randolph Bourne praised My Ántonia (1918) while denigrating the “swollen bulk” and “stale brightness of conversation” in White’s fiction. Cather approved Bourne’s comparison, dismissing White’s “jocular, familiar, grapenutsy way” of presenting his subject matter that “really presents…his own essentially vulgar personality” (#2085). Cather’s correspondence with White commenced in 1919. She later asked him to review One of Ours (1922), suggesting that although she had few “readers in Nebraska or Kansas,” the novel was for her “home people,” who would be persuaded by his opinion (#0603). He apparently did not review the novel, but they met when he visited New York City in October 1922 and maintained a cordial correspondence until his death.

Lewis, Sinclair (1885-1951). American novelist. Born in Sauke Centre, MN, Sinclair Lewis graduated from Yale University in 1908. Although he published short stories and several novels in the teens, he achieved critical and popular success with Main Street (1920), which satirized Midwestern provincialism. On a 1921 lecture tour, he regularly praised Cather’s work. He continued with a string of popular and critical successes, including Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925) (for which he declined the Pulitzer Prize for fiction), Mantrap (1926), and Elmer Gantry (1927). Even though he depicted One of Ours (1922) as a failure in his New York Evening Post review, Cather invited him to tea and said she was not “a particle sore at him” (#0624). Although they infrequently saw each other in person, they remained on good terms, and when Lewis was the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, he praised Cather in his acceptance speech. Lewis was married and divorced twice, first to Grace Livingston Hegger and then to Dorothy Thompson. Later, he lived with Rosemary Marcella Powers, whom Cather met. Lewis’s later career was marred by his alcoholism, which led to his death in Rome, Italy.