Luhan, Mabel Dodge (1879-1962). American patron of the arts and memoirist. Born Mabel Ganson into a wealthy Buffalo, NY, family, Mabel Evans traveled to Paris, France, in 1904 after the death of her first husband. She met and married Edwin Dodge there and moved with him to a villa in Florence, Italy, where they collected art and Mabel conducted a salon. She moved to New York City in 1912 and separated from her husband soon after (they divorced in 1916). In her Fifth Avenue apartment near Washington Square, she reestablished her salon and supported modern art and radical political causes. Cather may have known Mabel Dodge slightly during her New York year but came to know her better in New Mexico, where she moved in 1917 with her third husband, Maurice Sterne, from whom she divorced in 1922. Mabel married Antonio Lujan, a Taos Pueblo Indian, in 1923. Thereafter she called herself Mabel Dodge Luhan. When Cather and Edith Lewis traveled to New Mexico in June 1925, Luhan invited Cather to visit her in Taos, seeking advice on her manuscript memoirs of her life. Lewis and Cather’s long stay in Taos inspired Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Cather briefly returned to Luhan's Taos compound in 1926, when Luhan was absent, and although Luhan invited Cather and Lewis back, they did not return to New Mexico. In 1928, Cather encouraged Alfred Knopf to consider publishing the early volumes of Luhan’s memoirs, praising them as “intensely interesting and alive” (#2589). However, Harcourt Brace published all four volumes of Luhan’s memoirs, Background (1933), European Experiences (1935), Movers and Shakers (1936), and Edge of Taos Desert (1937). Cather also read the later portions in manuscript. Cather praised Luhan’s memoir of D.H. Lawrence during his New Mexico years, Lorenzo in Taos (Knopf 1932), as “the best portrait there ever will be of Lawrence” (#1036). Luhan lived in Taos until her death.

Cather, Charles Fectigue (1848-1928). Cather’s father. Charles Fectigue (possibly Fectique) Cather was born in the Back Creek Valley of Virginia, north of Winchester. His family were sheep raisers who were largely, but not entirely, Union supporters during the Civil War. He married Mary Virginia Seibert Boak, daughter of Confederate supporters, in 1872. In 1883 he and his family followed his parents, William and Caroline Cather, and brother George to Webster County in Nebraska, where various cousins and uncles had also settled. Initially he ran a ranch in the county but soon moved his family into the town of Red Cloud, where he had an insurance and real estate business. Four of his children, Willa, Roscoe, Charles, and Jessica, were born in Virginia, while three, James, Elsie, and John, were born in Nebraska. Cather’s relationship with her father was very warm: she made regular visits to her parents in Red Cloud and especially enjoyed her father’s letters expressing appreciation of her novels. A week after she concluded a visit to her ailing father in Red Cloud, he died of heart disease. He served as the prototype for Hillary Templeton in “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932).

Austermann, Eleanor C. Shattuck (1903-1994). Hotelkeeper, the Shattuck Inn. Eleanor Shattuck was born in New Hampshire, the eldest of Edmund and Helen E. Shattuck’s three children. She married George Austermann in 1927; they had four sons, one of whom died in 1933. That same year, her father died and she and her husband took over management of the Shattuck Inn, her family’s hotel in Jaffrey, NH, where Cather had been a regular summer or fall guest since 1917.

Austermann, George (1899-1982). Hotelkeeper, the Shattuck Inn. George Austermann, born in Missouri, married Eleanor Shattuck in 1927; they had four sons, one of whom died in 1933. That same year, after his wife’s father died, they took over the management of her family’s hotel, the Shattuck Inn, in Jaffrey, NH, where Cather had been a regular summer or fall guest since 1917.

Van Vechten, Carl (1880-1964). American novelist, critic, and photographer. Born in Cedar Rapids, IA, Carl Van Vechten graduated from the University of Chicago in 1903. After a stint at a Chicago newspaper he moved to New York City in 1906 and became assistant music critic for the New York Times. Immersing himself in the life of Greenwich Village, he met Willa Cather and attended the famous salon of Mabel Dodge (later Luhan). Van Vechten left full-time newspaper work in 1914 but continued championing the modern and avant garde in the arts. He advocated for the works of Gertrude Stein, who made him her literary executor, and became an important patron of the Harlem Renaissance. Van Vechten’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1912 and in 1914 he married actress Fania Marinoff, but throughout his life he also had affairs with men. In the 1930s, he began pursuing photography professionally, specializing in portraiture. After three years of evading him, in 1936 Cather finally sat for a portrait by him. During World War II, Van Vechten was active in the Stage Door Canteen and the American Theater Wing. He remained an active photographer and presence in New York’s cultural life until his death.