Vanamee, Grace Delle Davis (1876-1946). Assistant to the president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Born in North Adams, MA, daughter of George and Electra Magoon Davis, Grace Davis attended the Emerson College of Oratory in Boston from 1899 to 1900. She published occasional verse, taught, and lectured in schools until her marriage to lawyer William Vanamee in 1909. After his death, she joined the staff of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1915, becoming assistant to the president from 1921 to 1941; she corresponded with Cather and many other writers on Academy business. In the 1920s Grace Vanamee was active in Republican politics in New York, once running on a ticket headed by Fiorello LaGuardia. She retired to Florida, where she died.

Glasgow, Ellen Anderson Gholson (1873-1945). American novelist. Glasgow was born and lived for most of her life in Virginia. She has been described as both a realist and a naturalist, and her fiction focuses primarily on the lives of Southern women. Her novel In This Our Life (1941) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Cather seems to have met Glasgow at public functions and a dinner at the home of her publishers, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, but no friendship or correspondence developed, and she left no record of her response to Glasgow’s novels.

Tarkington, Booth (1869-1946). American novelist. A best-selling and prolific novelist, Tarkington received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1920). Most of his novels are set in his home state of Indiana, including The Gentleman from Indiana (1899), which launched his career and was serialized in McClure’s Magazine and published in book form by S.S. McClure. Writing in the Lincoln Courier in 1900, Cather dismissed the “amateurish” execution of this novel, and her passing remarks in letters after she herself was established as a novelist suggest she did not believe he improved.

Wilder, Thornton (1897-1975). American novelist and playwright. Born in Madison, WI, and educated partially abroad because his father was a diplomat, Wilder graduated from Yale University in 1920. His second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), a historical novel set in seventeenth-century Peru, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Leftist critics attacked his The Woman of Andros (1930), set in pre-Christian Greece, for avoiding contemporary life and the Great Depression. He responded with Heaven’s My Destination (1935), featuring a depression-era salesman of religious textbooks traveling across America. Our Town (1938), his play about the fictional Grovers Corners (modeled after Peterborough, NH), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in drama. In the summer of 1926 Cather and Wilder met when they were both residents of the MacDowell Writers’ Colony in Peterborough. She saw Our Town performed on Broadway and to playwright Zoë Akins praised Wilder’s “very fine” representation of New England life and his technique in getting a “fine poem…onto the stage successfully” (#1407). She wrote him a fan letter telling him she loved “everything you have ever written, but you have done nothing so fine” as Our Town (#2014). Except for a time working in military intelligence in World War II, Wilder continued to be an active playwright and novelist until the end of his life. He died in Hamden, CT.

White, Stewart Edward (1873-1946). American writer. Born in Grand Rapids, MI, son of Thomas Stewart White and Mary Daniell White, Stewart White graduated from the University of Michigan in 1895. An outdoorsman, he worked for a time as a lumberjack in Michigan, prospected for gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and as a cowboy in Arizona. His popular stories of Western adventure, beginning with The Westerners (1901), were often filmed. In the 1920s, White and his wife, Elizabeth Grant White, co-wrote books which they said were channeled through spirits to them. White was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, through which he may have come in contact with Cather.