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.

Jeffers, John Robinson (1887-1962) (“Robinson”). American poet. Born in Allegheny, PA, to the Rev. William Jeffers and Annie Robinson Tuttle Jeffers, Robinson Jeffers was educated largely abroad before entering Occidental College, graduating in 1905 at age 18. In graduate school he met Una Call Kuster; they married in 1913 after her divorce and had twin sons in 1916. Jeffers matured as a poet after moving to Carmel, CA, and building a stone house and tower. His long, Greek-inspired narrative poems such as Tamar (1924) and Roan Stallion (1925) established his reputation, culminating in his adaptation of Medea (1947), which was a Broadway success. In the late 1920s and early 1930s the Jeffers family spent several summers at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s ranch in New Mexico; Luhan passed on Jeffers’ praise of Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) to Cather.

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.