Austin, Mary Hunter (1868-1934). American author and critic. Born in Carlinville, IL, Mary Hunter received a BS from Blackburn College in 1888, the same year she moved with her mother and siblings to California’s San Joaquin Valley. In 1891 she married Stafford Wallace Austin. In 1903, they separated (they divorced in 1915) and her collection of California desert stories, The Land of Little Rain, appeared. Between 1903 and 1924, Austin spent periods of time in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City; London, England; and Carmel, CA; however, most of her literary output continued to focus on the deserts of California and the Southwest. Cather may have met Austin as early as 1910, and Austin’s poetry appeared in McClure’s Magazine in 1911 and 1912. In February 1919 Austin wrote Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin, their mutual publisher, praising My Ántonia (1918) and asking for additional information and materials to write an appreciation of Cather for El Palacio, a magazine published in Santa Fe, NM; her essay appeared in 1920. When Cather and Edith Lewis travelled to the Southwest in 1925, they saw Austin in New Mexico, where she had built Casa Querida in Santa Fe in 1924. When Cather returned in 1926 to continue research and writing of Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Austin offered her the use of her empty house to work in. Cather inscribed a copy of Archbishop “For Mary Austin, in whose lovely study I wrote the last chapters of this book,” but she began denying that she had written any part of the novel in Casa Querida after Austin published Earth Horizon (1932), in which she called Cather’s celebration of French missionary priests a “calamity” for Southwestern culture. Austin died at home two years later.

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).

Knopf, Alfred A. (1892-1984). President of New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Knopf received his BA from Columbia University in New York City in 1912 and founded Alfred Knopf, Inc., in 1915 with his future wife Blanche Wolf. They married in 1916, and their son Alfred “Pat” Knopf was born in 1918. Cather chose him as her publisher beginning with Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920) and One of Ours (1922), partly because she was dissatisfied with the promotion of her books by Houghton Mifflin but also because she recognized the high quality of Knopf's books, as well as what she regarded as his intelligent advertising. Knopf was noted for publishing the work of leading European and South American writers in translation, as well as original works. Knopf and Cather’s extensive correspondence testifies to their mutual professional respect and to what also became an important personal friendship.