Akins, Zoë (1886-1958). American poet, playwright, and screenwriter. Akins’ friendship with Cather started in 1909, when she submitted verse to McClure’s magazine, which Cather rejected, advising her to stay with playwriting. Akins subsequently moved from her hometown of St. Louis, MO, to New York City and achieved success as a playwright. She moved to California in the 1930s, adding screenwriting to her accomplishments. Her play The Old Maid (1935), an adaptation of an Edith Wharton novel, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. In 1932, Akins married Captain Hugh Rumbold, a British theatrical designer and director; he died eight months later. Cather and Akins carried on a lifelong correspondence, with Cather writing affectionate letters that included both commentary on her own works and criticism of Akins’.

Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945). Nazi leader of Germany, 1934-1945.

Undset, Sigrid (1882-1949). Norwegian novelist. Undset is best known for her historical novels set in medieval Norway, the Kristin Lavrandsdatter trilogy (1920-22), set in the fourteenth-century, The Master of Hestvikin tetralogy (1925-27), set in the thirteenth century. Early in her career she wrote realistic novels set in contemporary Norway, including Jenny (1911) about a woman painter. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928 and continued to publish novels, set both in contemporary and historical Norway, that reflected her conversion to Catholicism. Undset persuaded her Norwegian publisher to issue her sister Signe Undset Thomas’s translation of Lucy Gayheart (1935) (the only Norwegian translation of Cather’s work to appear before her death). A strong critic of the German Reich, Undset made a dramatic escape from Norway over the arduous land route when the Nazis invaded Norway in April 1940, events she later described in Return to the Future (1942). When Undset reached New York City in the fall of 1940, Alfred Knopf, Cather and Undset’s mutual publisher, arranged their first meeting. They had long been enthusiastic readers of each other’s novels and were evidently established correspondents, although their extant correspondence begins in 1940. During her exile Undset settled in a residential hotel in Brooklyn Heights, and she and Cather saw each other socially. Cather praised her as “just all a great woman should be - and on a giant scale” (#1541). Undset was an active public critic of the Nazis during her exile. She returned to Norway at the close of the war in 1945 and died there.