Roseboro’, Viola (1857-1945). American editor and author. Born in Pulaski, TN, to parents whose abolitionist sympathies caused them to flee the state shortly before the Civil War, Viola Roseboro’ graduated from Fairmount College in Monteagle, TN. Before moving to New York City around 1882, she was an actress with a traveling stock company. In New York she worked as a journalist and began publishing short stories in magazines while continuing to tour occasionally until she left the stage permanently in 1887. Roseboro’ actively published fiction for the rest of her life, including The Joyous Heart (1903), a Civil War novel critical of Southern slavery, and Players and Vagabonds (1904), a collection of stories about the theater. Having sold short stories to the McClure fiction syndicate in the 1880s, in the early 1890s she began evaluating manuscripts for the syndicate and soon did the same for McClure’s Magazine and book publisher McClure, Phillips & Co. Cather evidently first met Roseboro’ in 1903, when S.S. McClure called her to New York to discuss her fiction; the two women began corresponding, and Roseboro’ may have influenced McClure’s decision to hire Cather as an editor for his magazine in 1906. When most of the magazine editorial staff walked out on McClure that year, Roseboro’ stayed, but when S.S. McClure lost control of the magazine in 1911, she left for Collier’s Weekly. When her position there ended, she moved to Staten Island and struggled to support herself as an author’s consultant. When S.S. McClure regained control of his magazine in 1921, she rejoined the staff and took an apartment at 13 Bank Street, but the position did not last long and she was soon struggling to support herself again; a 1928 bequest from a friend alleviated her financial distress and allowed her to live comfortably abroad and in New Dorp on Staten Island. Cather’s letters to Roseboro’ suggest that, long after she became an established author, Cather valued Roseboro’s friendship and her judgment in literary matters. She particularly valued Roseboro’s response as a Southerner to Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), an advance copy of which she sent to her.

Knopf, Alfred A. (1892-1984). President of New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Knopf received his BA from Columbia University in New York City in 1912 and founded Alfred Knopf, Inc., in 1915 with his future wife Blanche Wolf. They married in 1916, and their son Alfred “Pat” Knopf was born in 1918. Cather chose him as her publisher beginning with Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920) and One of Ours (1922), partly because she was dissatisfied with the promotion of her books by Houghton Mifflin but also because she recognized the high quality of Knopf's books, as well as what she regarded as his intelligent advertising. Knopf was noted for publishing the work of leading European and South American writers in translation, as well as original works. Knopf and Cather’s extensive correspondence testifies to their mutual professional respect and to what also became an important personal friendship.

Overton, Grant (1887-1930). American writer and editor. Born in New York, Overton worked for the New York Sun from 1906, serving as literary editor 1918-1919; Cather attributed the anonymous highly favorable review of My Ántonia in the Sun to Overton. He was an editor for the publisher George Doran, and from 1924 to 1927 he edited Collier’s Magazine, which serialized The Professor’s House in 1925. In addition to editing short story anthologies, Overton wrote biographical sketches of contemporary writers, including one of Cather in The Women Who Make Our Novels (1918). His 1928 substantially revised edition of this book reflects his conversations with Cather in 1925 about My Ántonia and The Professor’s House.

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).