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.

Lewis, Edith Labaree (1881-1972). Magazine editor, advertising copywriter, and Cather's domestic partner. Born in Lincoln, NE, to Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Edith Lewis attended the preparatory school associated with the University of Nebraska, earning college credits from the University before transferring to Smith College in Northampton, MA, in 1899. She received an A.B. in English from Smith in 1902 and returned home to teach elementary school. She met Willa Cather in the summer of 1903 at the home of Sarah Harris, publisher of the Lincoln Courier. Moving to New York City soon afterward, Lewis settled into a studio on Washington Square and found work at the Century Publishing Company. Cather was her guest when she visited the city from Pittsburgh. In 1906, at Cather's suggestion, Lewis applied for a position as an editorial proofreader at McClure's Magazine, and the two women worked together on the McClure's staff for six years. In 1908, they moved into a shared apartment at 82 Washington Place, and then, in 1912, to Five Bank Street. Lewis left McClure's in 1915 to become managing editor of Every Week Magazine, where she stayed until the magazine folded in 1918. In 1919 she began a long career as an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Co. In 1926 Edith Lewis acquired the land on which she and Cather built their cottage on Grand Manan Island. When they lost their apartment on Bank Street to subway construction in 1927, they shared quarters at the Grosvenor Hotel when they were both in New York City. In 1932 they took an apartment at 570 Park Avenue. Throughout their relationship, Lewis was closely involved in Cather's creative process, reading and editing her work in pre-publication forms. Cather's will appointed Lewis as executor of her literary estate and a beneficiary of her literary trust. Lewis authorized E.K. Brown as Cather's first biographer and published her own memoir of Cather, Willa Cather Living (1953). She remained in their Park Avenue apartment after Cather's death and died there after a long period of illness and invalidism. She is buried at Cather's side in Jaffrey, NH.