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.

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.