Gore, James Howard (1856-1939). American mathematics professor; Cather’s cousin. Born in Back Creek, VA, youngest son of Mahlon and Sidney Cather Gore (Willa Cather’s great-aunt), James showed early interest in the sciences. He graduated from Columbian University (now George Washington University) in 1877 and did post-graduate work abroad, returning to teach mathematics and geodesy at Columbian and at the Corcoran Scientific School; he received a PhD in 1888. In 1889 he married Swedish-born Lillian Sparrendahl, whom Cather admired. They had one daughter, Sidney, who died at age fifteen. Gore was a founder of the National Geographic Society and was associated with various scientific expeditions, but he was not part of actual polar expeditions, as Cather’s letters seem to imply. He was a member of several foreign orders from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Cather stayed with the Gores for part of her 1901 visit to Washington, DC. In The Professor’s House (1925), Tom Outland finds that the people he has to deal with in Washington, D.C., are obsessed with receiving orders and decorations.

Mellen, Richard Hager (1909-1957) (“Dick”). American physician; Mary Virginia Auld Mellen’s husband. Born in Vermont to Philip Edwin and Mary Wheaton Hager Mellen, Dick Mellen graduated from Amherst College in 1931, where Cather’s nephew William Thomas Auld was his roommate, and from Harvard Medical School in 1935. The same year he began a residency at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and married Cather’s niece, Mary Virginia Auld. Cather praised Mary Virginia’s choice of this “Vermont boy” whose family were “just the nicest kind of Vermont people” (#2117). Trained as an orthopedic surgeon, he accepted a position as chief of orthopedic surgery at a hospital in Chattanooga, TN, in 1942, when the previous head left to serve in the military. Almost immediately thereafter, Mellen himself was commissioned as an officer in the Army Medical Corps, serving from 1942 to 1946. In 1946, he and other physicians who had developed expertise during the war founded the American Society for Surgery of the Hand. From 1946 until his death, he was a surgeon at Glockner-Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs, CO.

Rogers, Bruce (1870-1957). American book designer and typographer. Born in Lafayette, IN, Bruce Rogers received a BS from Purdue University in 1890. In 1896 George H. Mifflin of Houghton Mifflin asked him to join the Riverside Press on the basis of his experience as a newspaper illustrator. In 1900 he took charge of the limited editions division at Riverside and began designing type fonts. He left in 1912 to work independently as a designer, with his crowning achievement being the Oxford Lectern Bible, commissioned in 1929 and completed in 1935, set in his Centaur typeface. In 1937, Houghton Mifflin hired Rogers to design the Autograph Edition of Cather’s works. When Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) was added to the set in 1941, Cather and Rogers corresponded about design issues. Yale, Harvard, and Purdue awarded Rogers honorary degrees, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the gold medal for graphic arts. He died at his home in New Fairfield, CT.

Whicher, George Frisbie (1889-1954). Amherst College English professor. After receiving a PhD from Columbia University in 1913, Whicher taught at Amherst College, his alma mater, from 1915 to 1954. The most notable of his many books and translations was a critical biography of Emily Dickinson, This Was a Poet (1938). Whicher sometimes taught at the Bread Loaf School of English, a summer program of Middlebury College in Vermont. He and his wife, Harriet Fox Whicher, met Cather there in 1922 when she came to give four lectures about writing. Cather enjoyed the company of their two sons, John Fox Whicher and Stephen Emerson Whicher, and she corresponded with Harriet and George until late in life.