Cather, Mary Virginia Boak (1850-1931) (“Virginia” or “Jenny”). Cather’s mother. Born in Virginia to William Lee Boak and Rachel Seibert Boak, Virginia was educated in Baltimore, MD, and was a schoolteacher until her marriage to Charles Fectigue Cather in 1872. Her husband’s family were primarily Union supporters during the Civil War while her family supported the Confederacy (three brothers served in the Confederate Army although their mother opposed slavery). After her marriage she tried to help unite the divided family. Four of her children, Willa, Roscoe, Charles Douglas, and Jessica Virginia, were born in Virginia, while three, James Donald, Elsie Margaret, and John Esten, were born in Nebraska after the family moved there in 1883. Despite occasional differences, Cather remained in affectionate contact with her mother, who remained in Red Cloud, NE, where the family settled in 1884. After her husband’s death in 1928 Virginia Cather suffered a stroke while visiting her children and their families in California. She spent nearly three years in a sanitarium in Pasadena, CA, unable to speak. Willa Cather visited her there several times but was unable to travel quickly enough from Grand Manan to Red Cloud for her funeral and interment after she died in Pasadena in 1931. Virginia Cather was the prototype for Victoria Templeton in “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932), which Willa Cather completed shortly before her mother’s death.

Adams, Georgine Milmine Welles (1874-1950). Canadian-American journalist. Born in Ontario, Canada, Georgine Milmine was the editor of the women’s page of the Syracuse (NY) Herald in 1905 when she married the newspaper’s managing editor, Benjamin Welles. From c. 1903 to 1906, she researched the life of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and sold her exposé of Eddy to McClure’s Magazine. Burton Hendrick, Will Irwin, Willa Cather, and others on the magazine’s staff verified her research, conducted additional research, and collaboratively rewrote Milmine’s account before it appeared under Milmine’s name in McClure’s from January 1907 to June 1908. After Benjamin Welles’ 1911 death, Georgine married Arthur Adams, with whom she moved to Falmouth, MA, in 1937. She and her second husband are buried in Auburn, NY, where they lived at the time of their marriage.

McClure, Samuel Sidney (1857-1949) (“S.S.”). Irish-born American publisher. McClure immigrated to the U.S. at age nine, living with his family in Indiana. Despite poverty and the limited education he had received in Ireland, he graduated from high school and then Knox College in Illinois. He then moved to Boston, MA, where from 1882 to 1884 he edited the Wheelman, a bicycling magazine. Despite opposition from her parents, he married his Knox College classmate Harriet Hurd in 1883. The couple had four biological children (Eleanor, Bess, Mary, and Robert), and adopted one (Enrico). In 1884, S.S. started McClure’s Syndicate, which placed fiction in newspapers across the country. In 1893 with his college classmate John Sanborn Phillips he started McClure's Magazine, which was best-known for the "muckraking" exposés by writers such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens, but which also published literature. After his cousin H.H. McClure, who worked for the McClure Syndicate, brought Cather to S.S. McClure’s attention, McClure, Phillips & Co. brought out Cather’s first book of fiction, The Troll Garden (1905). When most of the editorial staff, including Steffens and Tarbell, resigned from McClure’s in 1906, he hired Cather as an editor; she later became managing editor. After she left her position at McClure’s in 1912 and when S. S. McClure had lost control of the magazine still bearing his name, Cather ghost wrote his autobiography (McClure’s serial 1913-1914, book publication 1914). McClure made repeated—and ultimately failed—attempts to reestablish himself in journalism and magazine publishing, often trying to enlist Cather in these enterprises. She almost went with him to Europe in 1915 to report on the war for the Evening Mail, and she remained personally loyal to her mercurial and often-irresponsible former employer. He served as the prototype for Marcus O’Mally, editor of the Outcry, in her story “Ardessa” (1918), and it has been suggested that Cather modeled the courtship and marriage between Myra and Oswald Henshaw in My Mortal Enemy (1926) on that of the McClures.

Hendrick, Burton Jesse (1870-1949). American magazine writer, editor, and biographer. Hendrick graduated from Yale in 1895 and worked as a newspaper journalist until 1905, when he became a staff writer at McClure’s Magazine. Cather blamed him for errors in the first serialized installment in McClure’s of a biographical exposé of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. In 1913 Hendrick became associate editor of the World’s Work, a public affairs magazine founded by Walter Hines Page. Having won the Pulitzer Prize in biography as co-author of Victory at Sea (1921) and author of The Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page (1922), he left the magazine in 1927 to pursue writing biographies and histories, winning a third Pulitzer for a follow-up Page biography. Doubleday, Page, and Company, of which Walter Page was a partner, published all of Hendrick’s books.

Irwin, William Henry (1873-1948) (“Will”). American journalist. Born in Oneida, New York, Will Irwin grew up in Colorado, and after a year as a cowboy, he attended Stanford University, graduating in 1899. He became a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1901, then moved to New York in 1904 to work for the New York Sun. His book, The Picaroons co-authored with humorist Gelett Burgess, was published by McClure, Phillips in 1904. S. S. McClure hired Irwin as managing editor of McClure’s Magazine in 1906; he wrote some muckraking articles and also helped assemble materials for the articles on Christian Science which Cather would later write up. He left McClure’s to write for Collier’s and other magazines, and went to Europe as a correspondent on the outbreak of World War I. In 1916 he married writer and suffragist Inez Haynes Gilmore. Irwin wrote a variety of books after the war, including fiction (a few made into movies), biographies, and history.

Sullivan, Mark (1874-1952). American journalist. Mark Sullivan was born in Avondale, PA, to Julia Gleason and Cornelius Sullivan. Sullivan began attending Harvard University in 1896, earning an AB and a law degree in 1903. While attending school Sullivan published a number of articles in the Boston Evening Transcript, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Phoenixville Republican, which he co-owned with fellow reporter John Miller. Over the course of his 64-year long career, he worked at a wide range of newspapers, including McClure’s Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, Colliers, the New York Evening Post, and the New York Herald-Tribune. Sullivan frequently collaborated with Cather during his time as a staff writer at McClure’s Magazine from 1905 to 1906.