Hazen, Margaret Paige (1903-after 1955). American librarian and critic. Born in Plymouth, MA, to Mary A. Monroe and James W. Hazen, Margaret Hazen earned her BS from Boston University and worked as a librarian for Medford Public Libraries from 1921 to 1929. In 1930 she graduated from the Pratt Institute School of Library Science, becoming a reference librarian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hazen co-authored Library Work (1945) and The Library Profession (1955) and wrote book reviews for the Boston Evening Transcript. Her review of My Ántonia (1918) won a contest held by the Mark Twain Society which invited participants to answer the prompt, “what I consider the most representative novel from 1900 to 1931 and why.”

Cather, Mary Virginia Boak (1850-1931) (“Virginia” or “Jenny”). Cather’s mother. Born in the Virginia to William Lee Boak and Rachel Seibert Boak, Virginia was educated in Baltimore, MD, and was a schoolteacher until her marriage to Charles Fectigue Cather in 1872. Her husband’s family were primarily Union supporters during the Civil War while her family supported the Confederacy (three brothers served in the Confederate Army although their mother opposed slavery). After her marriage she tried to help unite the divided family. Four of her children, Willa, Roscoe, Charles Douglas, and Jessica Virginia, were born in Virginia, while three, James Donald, Elsie Margaret, and John Esten, were born in Nebraska after the family moved there in 1883. Despite occasional differences, Cather remained in affectionate contact with her mother, who remained in Red Cloud, NE, where the family settled in 1884. After her husband’s death in 1928 Virginia Cather suffered a stroke while visiting her children and their families in California. She spent nearly three years in a sanitarium in Pasadena, CA, unable to speak. Willa Cather visited her there several times but was unable to travel quickly enough from Grand Manan to Red Cloud for her funeral and interment after she died in Pasadena in 1931. Virginia Cather was the prototype for Victoria Templeton in “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932), which Willa Cather completed shortly before her mother’s death.

Clemens, Samuel Langhorne (1835-1910) (“Mark Twain”). American author and lecturer. Born in Florida, MO, to John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton Clemens, Samuel Clemens first worked as a typesetter and editorial assistant for the Hannibal Western Union. While working as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in 1863 he started to use the pseudonym “Mark Twain,” drawn from his work as a riverboat pilot. In 1869 his first novel, Innocents Abroad, was published; Clemens went on to write twenty-eight books and many short stories. Willa Cather read Clemens’s work and appreciated The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), but disparaged Joan of Arc (1896) as “thoroughly stupid” (Courier, 5 October 1895). Cather also knew Clemens during her first year in New York, and in 1905 she attended his 70th birthday celebration held at Delmonico’s Restaurant in New York City (#1298).