Sanborn, John Pitts (1879-1941) (“Pitts”). American music critic, poet, and novelist. Born in Port Huron, MI, John Pitts Sanborn received a BA (1900) and MA (1902) from Harvard University. In 1905, he became the music editor of the New York Globe, a position that entailed summer European travel. Willa Cather read and admired his music criticism, calling him “the most musicianly musical critic I know” (#0310), and he became a regular at Friday tea at Five Bank Street. She was delighted to be the one to introduce Sanborn to opera diva Olive Fremstad in April 1915. In 1923 Sanborn left the Globe to become foreign correspondent for the Evening Mail, of which he subsequently became music editor. He continued on as music editor when the Mail merged with the New York Telegram. His novel Prima Donna: A Novel of the Opera (1929) was acclaimed as one of the great novels about opera, and his Metropolitan Book of the Opera (1937) became a standard reference for opera-goers. He died in his Greenwich Village apartment in the midst of writing a review of a Metropolitan Opera performance he had just attended.