Canby, Henry Seidel (1878-1961). American critic and editor. Born to a prominent Wilmington, DE, family, Canby received a BA (1899) and PhD (1905) from Yale University. He began teaching English at Yale in 1900 and was editor of the Yale Review from 1911 to 1922. In 1920 he founded the Literary Review of the New York Post, which became an independent magazine, the Saturday Review of Literature, in 1924; he served as editor until 1936. He became editor in chief of the Book-of-the-Month Club on its founding in 1926. Canby married Marion Ponsonby Gause, also of Wilmington, in 1907, and they had two sons. Cather’s acquaintance with the Canbys seems to predate 1922, when her cordial correspondence with the Canbys began. In the Literary Review she published "The House on Charles Street" (1922) and in the Saturday Review a letter to Wilbur Cross on Shadows on the Rock (1931) and an essay on Thomas Mann (1936).

Alcott, Louisa May (1832-1888). American author. Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, PA, to Abigail May Alcott and Amos Bronson Alcott, and was raised in genteel poverty in Massachusetts. Her father was part of the American transcendentalist movement, and the family knew Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Alcott began writing in 1851 to contribute to the financial support of her family, publishing under various pseudonyms. Her experiences as a Civil War nurse inspired Hospital Sketches (1863). After its success, she began publishing short stories under her own name in Atlantic Monthly and Lady’s Companion. Cather read Little Women (1868) as a child and visited Orchardside, the Alcott family home in Concord, MA, in 1907 with Isabelle McClung. Cather found Katharine Anthony’s 1938 Freudian psychobiography of Alcott preposterous. She suggested to Henry Seidel Canby that letters from Alcott to her cousin Annie Adams Fields, which Cather destroyed at Fields’s request, might have disproven Anthony’s thesis (#1400).

Fields, Annie Adams (1835-1915). Literary hostess, author, and social reformer. At age 20, Annie Adams married James T. Fields, partner in the Boston publishing house of Ticknor & Fields. Both before and after her husband’s death in 1881, Fields often entertained important American, British, and European authors at her home at 148 Charles Street in Boston, MA. After James’ death, Sarah Orne Jewett, whose books were published by Ticknor & Fields, began sharing Annie’s homes at 148 Charles Street and Manchester-on-the-Sea, MA. Cather met Fields in Boston in 1908, a meeting Cather described in "The House on Charles Street," an essay reviewing Memories of a Hostess (a volume of selections from Fields' journals, 1922). A revised version of this essay, retitled "148 Charles Street," appeared in Not Under Forty (1936). After Jewett’s death in 1909, Fields edited The Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett (1911), which included several letters to Cather. Fearing that 148 Charles Street would become a museum after her death, Fields requested that it be torn down.

Canby, Marion Ponsonby Gause (1885-1974). American poet. Marion Ponsonby Gause was born in Wilmington, DE, and was educated at a private school. She married Henry Seidel Canby in 1907; they had two sons. She published two volumes of poetry, High Mowings (1932) and On My Way (1937). Cather probably met the Canbys in the early 1920s; her extant correspondence with them, together and individually, began in 1922.