Vermorcken, Elizabeth Moorhead (c.1866-1955). American writer and academic. Born in Pittsburgh, PA, Elizabeth Moorhead married Frederick Vermorcken in 1891, although the marriage did not last long, and she soon returned to Pittsburgh. In 1910 she began an eighteen-year teaching career as an Assistant Professor of English at Carnegie Technical Schools in Pittsburgh while also writing short stories and articles that appeared in national magazines. After retiring from teaching in 1928, she wrote three novels. After moving to Florence, Italy, in the 1930s, she began writing The Whirling Spindle (1942), about her family and friends in Pittsburgh, where she returned after Italy’s entry into WWII. Vermorcken likely met Cather in Pittsburgh in 1905, and they remained friends after Cather moved to New York City. Vermorcken wrote the first biographical account of Cather’s Pittsburgh years, These Too Were Here: Louise Homer and Willa Cather (1950).

Hambourg, Isabelle McClung (1877-1938). Cather’s longtime friend. Cather met Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a socially prominent, Pittsburgh (PA) family, in 1899 in the dressing room of actress Lizzie Hudson Collier. McClung seems to have been the first woman to reciprocate Cather’s romantic affections. In 1901, McClung invited Cather to live in her family’s large home in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. She and Cather traveled together to Europe in 1902, and McClung accompanied Cather on a visit home to Nebraska in 1905. After Cather moved to New York City in 1906, she frequently visited McClung in Pittsburgh, finding the familiar house a congenial place to write, and McClung visited New York City, staying with Cather and Edith Lewis. Cather and McClung also rented a vacation cabin in Cherry Valley, NY, in 1911, and traveled together to Virginia in 1913. In late 1915, shortly after the death of her father, Judge Samuel McClung, Isabelle announced her intention to marry violinist Jan Hambourg. Cather reacted negatively to the marriage (which took place in 1916) but eventually reconciled herself to it, enjoying long visits with the Hambourgs in Toronto, Ontario, in 1921 and France in 1923 and 1935. Cather and Edith Lewis also spent time with the Hambourgs in Paris is 1930 and 1935. The latter trip occurred after Isabelle sought treatment in the U.S. for the kidney disease that killed her several years later in Italy. Her death came only four months after Cather’s brother Douglass died, leaving her feeling bereft. “No other living person cared as much about my work, through thirty-eight years,” she wrote her brother Roscoe (#2137). After Isabelle’s death, Jan sent to Cather the six hundred letters from Cather to Isabelle in his possession, and Cather destroyed them, although a few letters from Isabelle and Cather postcards to Isabelle are extant.

Hambourg, Jan (1882-1947). Russian-born violinist; Isabelle McClung’s husband. Hambourg moved with his family to Toronto, Ontario, in 1910, where he was the head of the violin department at the Hambourg Conservatory and performed as part of the Hambourg Trio. He married Isabelle McClung in April 1916. Cather reacted negatively to both Hambourg and the marriage, but she gradually came to accept him. Beginning in the 1920s, Hambourg left the family conservatory and focused on solo violin performance in Europe. Cather enjoying long visits with Isabelle and Jan in Toronto in 1921 and France in 1923 and 1935. She dedicated The Professor’s House (1925) to him (“For Jan, because he likes narrative”) and asked him to make musical corrections to Lucy Gayheart (1935). When Isabelle died, Jan sent to Cather the three hundred letters from Cather to Isabelle in his possession, and Cather destroyed them.

Lewis, Edith Labaree (1881-1972). Magazine editor, advertising copywriter, and Cather's domestic partner. Born in Lincoln, NE, to Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Edith Lewis attended the preparatory school associated with the University of Nebraska, earning college credits from the University before transferring to Smith College in Northampton, MA, in 1899. She received an A.B. in English from Smith in 1902 and returned home to teach elementary school. She met Willa Cather in the summer of 1903 at the home of Sarah Harris, publisher of the Lincoln Courier. Moving to New York City soon afterward, Lewis settled into a studio on Washington Square and found work at the Century Publishing Company. Cather was her guest when she visited the city from Pittsburgh. In 1906, at Cather's suggestion, Lewis applied for a position as an editorial proofreader at McClure's Magazine, and the two women worked together on the McClure's staff for six years. In 1908, they moved into a shared apartment at 82 Washington Place, and then, in 1912, to Five Bank Street. Lewis left McClure's in 1915 to become managing editor of Every Week Magazine, where she stayed until the magazine folded in 1918. In 1919 she began a long career as an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Co. In 1926 Edith Lewis acquired the land on which she and Cather built their cottage on Grand Manan Island. When they lost their apartment on Bank Street to subway construction in 1927, they shared quarters at the Grosvenor Hotel when they were both in New York City. In 1932 they took an apartment at 570 Park Avenue. Throughout their relationship, Lewis was closely involved in Cather's creative process, reading and editing her work in pre-publication forms. Cather's will appointed Lewis as executor of her literary estate and a beneficiary of her literary trust. Lewis authorized E.K. Brown as Cather's first biographer and published her own memoir of Cather, Willa Cather Living (1953). She remained in their Park Avenue apartment after Cather's death and died there after a long period of illness and invalidism. She is buried at Cather's side in Jaffrey, NH.

Adams, Henry (1838-1918). American historian. Born in Boston, MA, into the Brahmin class, Henry Adams graduated from Harvard University in 1859 and worked for his father as a private secretary, Charles Francis Adams, who served as minister to England during the Civil War. Adams was a correspondent for several American periodicals, including The Nation. Appointed to teach medieval history at Harvard, Adams became editor of the North American Review in 1870. Adams wrote: Chapters of Erie and Other Essays (1871), Democracy, an American Novel (1880), The Life of Albert Gallatin (1879), John Randolph (1882), and a nine-volume History of the United States of America (1889-91). He privately published and distributed his memoir The Education of Henry Adams in 1907; published for general distribution posthumously in 1918, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1919. Cather read and enjoyed Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartes (1904) (#273).

Wilder, Thornton (1897-1975). American novelist and playwright. Born in Madison, WI, and educated partially abroad because his father was a diplomat, Wilder graduated from Yale University in 1920. His second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), a historical novel set in seventeenth-century Peru, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Leftist critics attacked his The Woman of Andros (1930), set in pre-Christian Greece, for avoiding contemporary life and the Great Depression. He responded with Heaven’s My Destination (1935), featuring a depression-era salesman of religious textbooks traveling across America. Our Town (1938), his play about the fictional Grovers Corners (modeled after Peterborough, NH), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in drama. In the summer of 1926 Cather and Wilder met when they were both residents of the MacDowell Writers’ Colony in Peterborough. She saw Our Town performed on Broadway and to playwright Zoë Akins praised Wilder’s “very fine” representation of New England life and his technique in getting a “fine poem…onto the stage successfully” (#1407). She wrote him a fan letter telling him she loved “everything you have ever written, but you have done nothing so fine” as Our Town (#2014). Except for a time working in military intelligence in World War II, Wilder continued to be an active playwright and novelist until the end of his life. He died in Hamden, CT.