Brooks, Van Wyck (1886-1963). American literary critic and cultural historian. Born in Plainfield, NJ, and educated at Harvard University, Brooks was a prolific author of books on American literature and culture, focusing especially on the legacies of Puritanism and on nineteenth-century American literature. The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865 (1936) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1937. Followed by New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915 (1940) and three additional volumes about American literature through the early twentieth century, the five volumes were collected as Makers and Finders: A History of the Writer in America, 1800-1915 (1952). In 1940 Brooks wrote Cather about Archibald MacLeish’s book The Irresponsibles (1940), and she agreed with his assessment of it. Shortly thereafter, she wrote to correct his assertion in Indian Summer that she had edited the letters of Sarah Wyman Whitman. It is not clear whether their acquaintance went beyond this brief correspondence.

Jewett, Sarah Orne (1849-1909). American short story writer and novelist. Born in South Berwick, ME, Jewett began sharing homes in Boston (at 148 Charles Street) and Manchester-on-the-Sea, MA, with Annie Adams Fields in 1881, while continuing to live in her family home in South Berwick with her mother and sister part of the year. She was associated throughout her career with the Atlantic Monthly, and her best-known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, was serialized there in 1896. Like much of her fiction, it focused on rural and small town New England life. By the time Cather met Jewett at 148 Charles Street in 1908, Jewett had largely ceased writing because of a spinal concussion she suffered in a 1902 carriage accident. She wrote important letters of advice to Cather in 1908, criticizing her decision to write "The Gull's Road" (1908) from the perspective of a male character, which she called "something of a masquerade" (27 Nov. 1908), and urging her to give up her editorial work at McClure's Magazine so she could focus full-time on fiction writing (13 Dec. 1908). After Jewett's death in South Berwick in 1909, Cather often referred to her and her advice about writing. Cather edited The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925) for publisher Houghton Mifflin, and in her preface classed The Country of the Pointed Firs with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as one of "three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life."

Tyson, Emily Davis (1856-1922). American socialite. Born into a wealthy and socially prominent family in Philadelphia, PA, Emily Davis married George Tyson, a wealthy Boston, MA, widower with three children, in 1875. The Tysons lived on Dartmouth Street in the Back Bay neighborhood, where Annie Adams Fields was a neighbor. In 1881 George Tyson died, leaving Emily Tyson a substantial fortune. At the urging of Sarah Orne Jewett, in 1898 Emily and her step-daughter Elizabeth Russell Tyson (Elsie) bought Hamilton House (built 1787-1788) in South Berwick, ME, turning it into a highly romanticized inaccurate vision of a colonial-era estate. Jewett made Hamilton House a key setting in The Tory Lover (1901), her historical novel of the American Revolution. Cather evidently met Emily Tyson, either through Annie Fields and/or Sarah Orne Jewett or through Jewett’s sister Mary Rice Jewett.