Cather, James Donald (1886-1966) (“Jim”). Cather’s brother. James was born in Red Cloud, NE, the fifth child and third son of Charles and Virginia Cather. James moved to Wyoming in 1907 to work with his brothers Douglass and Roscoe. In 1913 he married Ethel Garber, and owned and operated clothing stores first in Red Cloud and then Holyoke, CO, where the family settled for a time 1920 before returning to Red Cloud in 1922. The couple had two children, Helen Louise and Charles Edwin. In 1930 the family moved to California so James could work in the oil business with Douglass and his partners. Willa’s relationship with James was more distant than that with her brothers Douglass and Roscoe, who were closer to her own age, although she was very fond of his children.

Cather, John (1892-1959) (“Jack”). Cather’s brother. Born and raised in Red Cloud, NE, Jack was the seventh child and fourth son of Charles and Virginia Cather. He was nearly two decades younger than Willa Cather, and she was a doting older sister when he was a small boy. Because she missed him after her 1896 move to Pittsburgh, PA, she wrote several poems about him and the story “Jack-a-Boy” (1901). After graduating from Red Cloud High School in 1912, Jack studied for two years at University of Nebraska in Lincoln. With Willa Cather’s encouragement, in 1914 he enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh to study engineering. Willa Cather was then living in New York City but traveled to Pittsburgh to help him settle in and enjoyed visiting him and supported his decision to change his major to theater. It is not clear whether he graduated from Carnegie Tech but the British government trained him as a chemist so he could inspect munitions factories. While working in Smethport, PA, he met Irma Wells, and they married in 1918. They had two children, Catherine and Ella Faye. After World War I, he worked as a chemical engineer in the oil industry in Cincinnati, OH, Casper, WY, and Bradford, PA. In 1936 he moved to Whittier, CA, and became a business partner with his brothers Douglass and James in an oil production company. He died in Long Beach, CA. Willa Cather mentions him frequently in letters, but she seems to have had little contact with him and his family in later years, and no letters from her to him have surfaced.

Cather, Charles Edwin (1923-2011). Cather’s nephew. Charles’s parents were James D. and Ethel Garber Cather, and he was likely born in Red Cloud, NE, where he spent the early years of his childhood. He was, as Willa Cather wrote to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, “the little nephew I love the best” who inspired her portrayal of the little boy Jacques in Shadows on the Rock (1931) (#1054). He moved with his family to California in the 1930s. Cather continued to be an indulgent aunt as he got older, writing him letters of advice about and lending him money for his education. He attended, but did not complete degrees from, the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, the United States Military Academy in West Point, NY, and the Law School at the University of Colorado in Boulder. After his aunt’s death he completed undergraduate and law degrees at Stanford University, in Palo Alto, CA. He was a beneficiary of his aunt’s estate and was appointed her literary executor after Edith Lewis’s death.

Auld, William Thomas (1908-2000) (“Tom,” “Will”). Cather's nephew. Born in Red Cloud, NE, to Jessica Cather Auld and James William Auld, William Thomas Auld graduated from Red Cloud High School in 1927 and Amherst College in Amherst, MA, in 1931. His roommate at Amherst, Richard Hager Mellen, would later marry his sister, Mary Virginia Auld. He graduated from Stanford University Medical School in 1936, the same year he married Helen Jane Wall. From 1938 until his retirement, Auld practiced pediatrics in Stockton, CA, except for the four years (1942-1946) he served in the Army Air Force Medical Corps. He and his wife had no children. Willa Cather seems to have had minimal contact with her nephew as an adult, and there are no known letters from her to him.

Auld, Charles Cather (1911-1992). American businessman; Cather’s nephew. Born in Red Cloud, NE, Charles Auld was the younger son of William Auld and Jessica Cather Auld (Willa Cather’s sister). He graduated from the Red Cloud high school in 1930, and from Stanford University in 1934 with a degree in economics. He settled in southern California, where his mother and brother Thomas also lived, but served overseas as a captain in World War II. Willa Cather had little contact with Charles Auld after he was grown.

Cady, Frank William (1877-1963). American professor of literature. Born in Aurora, IL, son of Martin E. Cady and Helen Howard Cady, Frank Cady received his bachelor’s degree in literature from Oxford University in England. He married Marian Kingsbury in 1909; they had three children. Cady taught at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he specialized in Shakespeare. In 1946 Cady and Van H. Cartmell published Shakespeare: Arranged for Modern Reading, an edition of the plays which Cather disliked.

Brandeis, Louis Dembitz (1856-1941). American attorney and Supreme Court Justice. Born in Louisville, KY, to German Jewish parents who fled Austria after the Revolution of 1848, Brandeis was educated in Dresden, Germany, and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1875. In 1879 he and Samuel Warren established the law firm of Warren and Brandeis in Boston, MA. He married Alice Goldmark in 1891, and together they embraced progressive causes, especially labor reform. The National Consumers League, in which Alice’s sisters Pauline and Josephine were active, enlisted Louis Brandeis to argue Muller v. Oregon (1908), a case defending maximum working hours for women workers, before the U.S. Supreme Court; the “Brandeis brief,” consisting primarily of sociological data gathered by the Goldmark sisters rather than legal argument, revolutionized constitutional law. From 1905 to 1913, he battled in court against J.P. Morgan’s attempts to create a railroad monopoly by merging the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad with the Boston & Maine Railroad. President Woodrow Wilson appointed Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1916, and he served until 1939. Willa Cather met the Brandeises in 1907-1908 when she was on assignment for McClure’s Magazine and also spent time in the Brandeis home when she made later visits to Annie Fields. She last saw Louis Brandeis in New York City, where he was visiting the Goldmark family, in 1913.

Fields, Annie Adams (1835-1915). Literary hostess, author, and social reformer. At age 20, Annie Adams married James T. Fields, partner in the Boston publishing house of Ticknor & Fields. Both before and after her husband’s death in 1881, Fields often entertained important American, British, and European authors at her home at 148 Charles Street in Boston, MA. After James’ death, Sarah Orne Jewett, whose books were published by Ticknor & Fields, began sharing Annie’s homes at 148 Charles Street and Manchester-on-the-Sea, MA. Cather met Fields in Boston in 1908, a meeting Cather described in "The House on Charles Street," an essay reviewing Memories of a Hostess (a volume of selections from Fields' journals, 1922). A revised version of this essay, retitled "148 Charles Street," appeared in Not Under Forty (1936). After Jewett’s death in 1909, Fields edited The Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett (1911), which included several letters to Cather. Fearing that 148 Charles Street would become a museum after her death, Fields requested that it be torn down.

Archer, William (1856-1924). Scottish writer, critic, and translator. Born in Perth, Scotland, William Archer spent several years of his childhood in Norway with his grandparents, who had settled there; his knowledge of Norwegian later enabled him to make his influential translations of Henrik Ibsen’s plays. Archer began his career in journalism while studying at Edinburgh University. Moving to London around 1879, he became a drama critic and translated Ibsen’s Pillars of Society and arranged for its first English production in 1880. A champion of modern dramatists such as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and J.M. Synge, Archer opposed censorship in the theater. However, during World War I, he worked for the British War Propaganda Bureau. Cather knew of Archer’s translations of Ibsen while she was at the University of Nebraska in the 1890s; she met Archer in 1908 on a visit to London for McClure’s Magazine, which commissioned articles from him. Although no correspondence between Cather and Archer has been located, she counted him as a friend and recounted their friendship in a letter to Ferris Greenslet (#1458).