Masaryk, Tomáš (1850-1937). Founder and first president of Czechoslovakia. Born in Moravia, which was then part of the Austrian Empire, Tomáš Masaryk received a doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1876. Studying in Leipzig, he met and then married American music student Charlotte Garrigue in 1878. Appointed professor of philosophy at the Czech University of Prague in 1882, he used his academic writings to promote the value of Czech culture. When he entered politics in the 1890s, he took up the cause of the Slovaks in northern Hungary. A key figure in the Czech-Slovak Union, he was elected Czechoslovakia’s first president in 1918. He resigned the presidency in 1935. Cather began corresponding with Masaryk in 1925 after he sent her a letter. She professed she was “glad” that her novel My Ántonia (1918) had “carried a message from [her] Bohemian neighbors” that she “loved as a child, to their home country” (#0768).

Hicks, Granville (1901-1982). American critic and writer. Born in New Hampshire, the only child of Frank and Carrie Hicks, Granville Hicks earned a BA (1923) and MA (1929) from Harvard University and briefly studied for the ministry. He taught biblical literature at Smith College from 1926-28, English at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from 1929-35 (he believed he was dismissed for his political views), and American Civilization at Harvard from 1938 to 1939. Drawn to Marxist ideas, he became literary editor of the New Masses and joined the American Communist Party in 1934. Under the sway of Marxist thought, he became a strident critic of what he saw as Cather’s escapism, including in a review of Shadows on the Rock (1931) in the Forum, “The Case Against Willa Cather” in the English Journal (1933), and in The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature since the Civil War (1933). Cather was under the misapprehension that Hicks had a brother who was also a leftist literary critic. Hicks broke with the Communist party in 1939, upon the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact. After his firing from RPI, Hicks and his wife Dorothy Dyer and their daughter, Stephanie, moved to Grafton, NY, and his book Small Town (1946) made him a notable proponent of rural small-town life, and he was actively anti-communist during the 1950s. He died in Franklin Park, NJ.

Garber, Winifred Richardson (1869-after 1930) (“Fred,” “Freddie”). Cather's Red Cloud acquaintance. Winifred Richardson, born in Nebraska, was the eldest daughter of stockman William N. Richardson, a prototype for Mr. Trueman in Cather’s “Two Friends” (1932). She attended a boarding school in St. Joseph, MO, from 1883-1886. In 1888 she married William Seward Garber, son of Silas Garber, a prototype for Captain Forrester in Cather’s A Lost Lady (1923). They had three daughters. The family moved to Lincoln, NE, then to Buffalo, NY; Winifred and her daughters moved to Los Angeles, CA, around 1920; she subsequently divorced her husband.

Cather, Charles Douglas (1880-1938) (“Douglass”). Cather’s brother. Born in Virginia and raised in Red Cloud, NE, Charles was third child and second son of Charles and Virginia Cather. As an adolescent, Douglass Cather helped his father supervise rented farm properties and worked as a messenger for the local Burlington & Missouri Railroad office. In 1897 he left Red Cloud for a position in Sterling, CO, and then took a position with at the Cheyenne, WY, office of the Burlington Railroad. In 1908 he traveled to Mexico, an experience that his sister gave to Emil Bergson in O Pioneers! (1913). By 1910 he was working for the Santa Fe railroad and living in Winslow, AZ, where Willa Cather visited him in 1912. He later achieved success in the oil business in California. Although he never married, Cather notes that during the last six or seven years of his life he had a relationship with Dorothy Rogers. Douglass visited Cather in New York City in December of 1937. His death in June 1938 left her devastated. Douglass served as a prototype for one of the twin brothers in the Templeton family in “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932) and Hector the messenger boy brother in “The Best Years” (1948). His years working for the Burlington also inspired Cather’s many railroad worker characters in her novels, including Song of the Lark (1915) and The Professor’s House (1925). Few letters from this important sibling relationship have survived.

Hambourg, Isabelle McClung (1877-1938). Cather’s longtime friend. Cather met Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a socially prominent, Pittsburgh (PA) family, in 1899 in the dressing room of actress Lizzie Hudson Collier. McClung seems to have been the first woman to reciprocate Cather’s romantic affections. In 1901, McClung invited Cather to live in her family’s large home in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. She and Cather traveled together to Europe in 1902, and McClung accompanied Cather on a visit home to Nebraska in 1905. After Cather moved to New York City in 1906, she frequently visited McClung in Pittsburgh, finding the familiar house a congenial place to write, and McClung visited New York City, staying with Cather and Edith Lewis. Cather and McClung also rented a vacation cabin in Cherry Valley, NY, in 1911, and traveled together to Virginia in 1913. In late 1915, shortly after the death of her father, Judge Samuel McClung, Isabelle announced her intention to marry violinist Jan Hambourg. Cather reacted negatively to the marriage (which took place in 1916) but eventually reconciled herself to it, enjoying long visits with the Hambourgs in Toronto, Ontario, in 1921 and France in 1923 and 1935. Cather and Edith Lewis also spent time with the Hambourgs in Paris is 1930 and 1935. The latter trip occurred after Isabelle sought treatment in the U.S. for the kidney disease that killed her several years later in Italy. Her death came only four months after Cather’s brother Douglass died, leaving her feeling bereft. “No other living person cared as much about my work, through thirty-eight years,” she wrote her brother Roscoe (#2137). After Isabelle’s death, Jan sent to Cather the six hundred letters from Cather to Isabelle in his possession, and Cather destroyed them, although a few letters from Isabelle and Cather postcards to Isabelle are extant.

Creighton, Mary S. Miner (1873-1968). Clubwoman; Cather’s friend from childhood. Born in Iowa, Mary Miner was the second daughter of James and Julia Miner, neighbors of the Cather family in Red Cloud, NE. Willa Cather later recalled that when she first moved into town with her family and enrolled in school in 1885, “Margie Miner was so jolly I wanted awfully to know her.” They became lifelong friends and correspondents, and Mary’s sisters Irene and Carrie were equally close to Cather. Mary Miner wed local physician E. A. Creighton in 1900 and lived the rest of her life in Red Cloud. She was the prototype for Julia Harling in My Ántonia (1918).