Street, Julian Leonard (1879-1947). American writer. Born in Chicago, IL, Street graduated from Ridley College, a boys’ preparatory school located in St. Catharines, ON, Canada, in 1896. In 1899, Street began reporting for the New York Mail and Express and took charge of the dramatic department in 1900. The same year, he married Ada Hilt, with whom he had two children and coauthored Tide (1926), a novel published shortly after her death. Street later married Marguerite Skibeness in 1930. Among his other works are The Most Interesting American (1915), an assessment of Theodore Roosevelt, The Country Cousin (1917), a comedy coauthored with Booth Tarkington, and “Mr. Bisbee’s Princess” (1925), a short story which won the O. Henry Award. Street was also a well-known authority on food and wine. For New York City wine merchant Bellows Co., he wrote an irregularly-published four-page pamphlet on wine, which Cather read and which disposed her to strike up a correspondence with him when he wrote asking her to autograph copies of her books.

Knight, Ridgway Brewster (1911-2001). American diplomat and wine merchant. Born in Paris, son of American painter Louis Knight and Caroline Ridgway Brewster Knight, Ridgway Knight was educated in France, then returned to the U.S. to enter the Harvard Business School, graduating in 1931. A few years later, he and Frederick S. Wildman bought Bellows and Company, wine and spirits merchants; Cather’s friend Julian Street became one of the directors of the company. Knight and Wildman sold the company at the outbreak of World War II, and Knight entered the foreign service, serving in North Africa, then in Western Europe after the war, before becoming ambassador to Syria, Belgium, and Portugal in the 1960s and 1970s. Cather bought some wine from Knight while he was in the wine business.