Bourda, Joséphine Marie Bernardine Brun (1892-1959). Cather’s maid. Raised in Lourdes in the Pyrénées region of France, Joséphine’s father Jean-Marie Brun ran a restaurant. In 1909 she married Alphonse Bourda, and they had two children, Marie, born 1910, and Clémentine, born 1912. In 1913 Joséphine, Alphonse, and Joséphine’s father immigrated to the U.S., leaving Marie and Clémentine behind with relatives. Alphonse and Joséphine’s third child, Jeanette, was born in New York City in late 1913. Soon after, Joséphine found work cooking and keeping house for Willa Cather and Edith Lewis in their Five Bank Street apartment. In 1919 the Bourda family was reunited in New York and Joséphine stopped working, but by late 1921, she was back working half days until sometime after 1925. She resumed working for Cather and Lewis in 1932 when they moved to a new apartment at 570 Park Avenue, but in 1935, she and her husband decided to return to France because of his failing health. Cather considered Joséphine a personal friend and praised her as “an artist in her way” (#0563). Cather and Bourda evidently corresponded after her return to France but their letters have not surfaced. She died in the village of Saint Pé de Bigorre.

Pound, Ezra (1885-1972). American poet and critic. Born in Hailey, ID, to Homer Loomis Pound and Isabel Weston Pound, Ezra Pound earned his PhB from Hamilton College and an MA from the University of Pennsylvania and taught Romance languages for a year at Wabash Presbyterian College before leaving for Europe in 1908, becoming an expatriate and a leading figure in the Imagist and modernist movements. Pound both published his own poetry and promoted modernist writers in publications like New Age, the Egoist, and Poetry. Pound wrote more than seventy books including, Personae (1909), Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1921), and The Cantos (1925-1962). He served as foreign advisor and editor of the Chicago-based little magazine the Dial from 1920 to 1923 and was responsible for its publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1922. Pound supported Benito Mussolini and made pro-Fascist broadcasts in Italy starting in 1935; in 1943 he was indicted in absentia for treason. After Mussolini’s surrender in 1945, Pound was arrested, declared insane, and confined until 1958. Cather was skeptical of both Pound’s poetry and him personally.

Watson, James Sibley (1894-1982). American publisher, medical doctor, and filmmaker. Watson was born in Rochester, NY, to Emily and James Watson. He graduated from Harvard University in 1916, and two years later he co-purchased the Dial with Scofield Thayer, a fellow Harvard graduate Watson befriended while serving on the Board of Editors of the Harvard Monthly. Watson would go on to co-edit the Dial with Thayer and Marianne Moore, who replaced Thayer in 1926, until the end of the magazine’s run in 1929. Along with his work as an editor, Watson also worked as a medical doctor and directed a number of avant-garde short films, such as The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Lot in Sodom (1932).

Thayer, Scofield (1889-1982). American writer and editor. Thayer was born in Worcester, MA, to Edward D. and Florence Thayer. He attended Harvard University, where he built relationships with other writers including E. E. Cummings and Gilbert Seldes. In 1919 Thayer and James Sibley Watson purchased the Dial and began working as the magazine’s co-editors. Under Thayer and Watson, the Dial became a platform for modernist artists, including writers such as Virginia Woolf and Carl Sandburg and painters such as Georgia O’Keefe and Paul Cezanne. Thayer resigned from the magazine in 1926 after a series of mental breakdowns and spent the remaining years of his life in the care of relatives and various institutions after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. After his death, he donated his collection of roughly 400 paintings, sculptures, and drawings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.