Knopf, Alfred, Jr. (1918-2009) (“Pat”). Publisher; son of Alfred and Blanche Knopf. Born in White Plains, NY, “Pat” was the only child of Alfred and Blanche Knopf. Preoccupied with the publishing business of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., they left him to be cared for by nannies and sent him to Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite boarding school in New Hampshire. Willa Cather was very fond of him and corresponded with him about his reading and education. When he failed to gain entrance to Princeton University, he ran away with only $15 in his pocket, and his parents found him in Salt Lake City, UT. Alfred Knopf shared this story, otherwise treated as a deep family secret, with Cather. Pat subsequently enrolled in Union College in Schenectady, NY. He wrote asking Cather about the structure of The Professor’s House (1925), and she permitted Burgess Johnson, Pat’s English professor at Union, to publish her remarks as “When I wrote The Professor’s House” in the College English Association newsletter (1938). Pat’s studies were interrupted when he was called up for military service in 1941; he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Awarded his BA in 1943 he joined the family business, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1946 as company secretary and trade books manager, subsequently becoming vice president of sales and establishing the Vintage Books paperback imprint. He cofounded the Atheneum imprint in 1960 and retired as a senior vice-president of Macmillan in 1988.

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.