Woollcott, Alexander (1887-1943). American critic and radio personality. Born in Phalanx, NJ, Alexander Woollcott graduated from Hamilton College in 1909. Joining the New York Times as a cub reporter after graduation, he became drama critic in 1914. After serving in the U.S. Army as a reporter for the Stars and Stripes (1917-1918), he returned to the Times and subsequently worked for the New York Herald, the New York World, and the New Yorker and was associated with the Algonquin Round Table group in the 1920s and 30s. Throughout his career Woollcott was known for his flamboyance and acerbic wit. He became host of “The Town Crier” radio program in 1929. He retired to an estate in Vermont in the 1930s, but he returned to New York City in 1940 to play Sheridan Whiteside, the title character of George Kaufman and Moss Hart’s play The Man Who Came to Dinner, an annoying New York critic and radio celebrity modeled on himself. It is not clear when Cather met Woollcott, but she called him “one of my best friends” (#1633) and was pleased when he “serenaded” her on his radio program and responded positively to his request that her Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) be put into an Armed Services Edition. However, she declined to allow him to anthologize her work or have it read over the air.

Nolan, Robert Bransfield (1917-1998). American reader. Born in Boston, MA, to Joseph J. and Fannie Nolan, Robert Bransfield Nolan grew up in Newton, MA, and later attended the University of New Hampshire. During World War II, Nolan wrote to his father from basic training at Camp Croft, SC, and described reading Woollcott’s Second Reader (1937) and serving mass in a small church. Nolan’s father sent a copy of the letter to Alexander Woollcott, who later sent a copy to Cather.

Balzac, Honoré de (1799-1850). French novelist and playwright. Born in France to an aspiring artisan and merchant class family, Balzac studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and then trained as a lawyer. Despite pressure from his family, he gave up law to pursue authorship, first writing plays and then novels. His first great success was La Comédie Humaine, a series of stories, novels, and essays ultimately running to ninety-one volumes and encompassing French society from the early through mid nineteenth-century. Balzac was a formative figure in the French realist tradition, and Cather referred to him frequently in her journalistic writings, criticism, fiction, and letters. In The Song of the Lark (1915), Dr. Archie has many volumes of Balzac in his library, telling Thea Kronborg that “A Frenchman undertook to write about a whole cityful of people, all the kinds he knew,” and characterizes the result “interesting.” In her essay “The Novel Démeublé” (1922), however, Cather dismissed Balzac’s attempt “to reproduce the actual city of Paris” as “unworthy of an artist.”

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807-1882). American poet. Longfellow is regarded by many as the most popular American poet of the nineteenth century and is credited with bringing European cultural traditions to an American audience. While Longfellow is best known as a poet, he also worked as a translator and as a professor of modern languages at both Bowdoin College (his alma mater) and Harvard. His most well known poems include: The Song of Hiawatha, Evangeline, and Paul Revere’s Ride. After his death he became the first American honored in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey. Longfellow maintained a long friendship with his publisher, James T. Fields, and Fields’ wife Annie Adams Fields, who became Cather’s friend. In “148 Charles Street” (1936), Cather recalled that in her “father’s bookcase” during her childhood “there were little volumes of Longfellow” published by Ticknor and Fields, and quotations from Longfellow’s poetry appear in several of her novels.

Jefferson, Nancy (c. 1840-after 1880) (“Nancy Till”). African American-Canadian formerly enslaved person and housekeeper. Probably born in Virginia, Nancy Jefferson was the daughter of Matilda Jefferson, an enslaved person in the Seibert family (Cather’s maternal great-grandparents) and an unknown, presumably white, man. She escaped from slavery in the mid-1850s and made her way to Canada. Nancy was the prototype for Nancy, the enslaved girl in Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). Cather said that the plot of the novel was based on family stories about the actual events, and that the epilogue, “Nancy’s Return,” was based on her own memory of Nancy returning to visit her mother around 1880. Lack of documentation of the lives of African Americans, and enslaved people in particular, makes it difficult to verify many of the details of Cather’s story.

Boak, Rachael Seibert (1816-1893). Cather’s grandmother. Born in Frederick County, VA, to Jacob and Rhuhamah Seibert, Rachael Seibert married William Lee Boak in 1830, when she was about fifteen. In 1845 the growing family moved to Washington, DC. They had nine children, with six surviving to adulthood; one son was killed in the Civil War while serving in the Confederate Army. Widowed in 1854, Mrs. Boak moved back to Frederick County; Willa Cather was born in her house. Later she joined the Charles Cather household and moved with them to Nebraska. Rachel Boak’s parents were prototypes for Sapphira and Henry Colbert in Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), and she herself was a prototype for Rachel Blake in that novel and for the title character in “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932).