Sedgwick, Ellery (1872-1960). American magazine editor. Born in New York City to parents from a distinguished New England family, Ellery Sedgwick graduated from Harvard University in 1894. He was assistant editor of the Youth’s Companion (1896-1899) and then editor of Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly (1900-1906—renamed Leslie’s Monthly then American Illustrated Magazine). He worked from 1906 to 1907 at McClure’s Magazine and briefly as a book editor at D. Appleton and Company; in 1909 he began his long run as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, which he had bought in 1908. Cather evidently first met Sedgwick when they both worked at McClure’s, although she may also have encountered him at the home of Annie Adams Fields in Boston. When Sedgwick wrote to Cather soliciting a review of Memories of a Hostess: A Chronicle of Eminent Friendships, Drawn Chiefly from the Diaries of Mrs. James Fields (1922, edited by MA DeWolfe Howe), she identified the Atlantic as “the only American magazine I read” (#3021). She also published the poem “Poor Marty” (1931) and the essay “A Chance Meeting” (1933) in the Atlantic. Sedgwick’s wife Mabel, whom he married in 1904, died in 1937. He sold the Atlantic in 1939, the same year he married Marjorie Russell. He died in Washington, DC.

Brooks, Van Wyck (1886-1963). American literary critic and cultural historian. Born in Plainfield, NJ, and educated at Harvard University, Brooks was a prolific author of books on American literature and culture, focusing especially on the legacies of Puritanism and on nineteenth-century American literature. The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865 (1936) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1937. Followed by New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915 (1940) and three additional volumes about American literature through the early twentieth century, the five volumes were collected as Makers and Finders: A History of the Writer in America, 1800-1915 (1952). In 1940 Brooks wrote Cather about Archibald MacLeish’s book The Irresponsibles (1940), and she agreed with his assessment of it. Shortly thereafter, she wrote to correct his assertion in Indian Summer that she had edited the letters of Sarah Wyman Whitman. It is not clear whether their acquaintance went beyond this brief correspondence.

Jewett, Sarah Orne (1849-1909). American short story writer and novelist. Born in South Berwick, ME, Jewett began sharing homes in Boston (at 148 Charles Street) and Manchester-on-the-Sea, MA, with Annie Adams Fields in 1881, while continuing to live in her family home in South Berwick with her mother and sister part of the year. She was associated throughout her career with the Atlantic Monthly, and her best-known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, was serialized there in 1896. Like much of her fiction, it focused on rural and small town New England life. By the time Cather met Jewett at 148 Charles Street in 1908, Jewett had largely ceased writing because of a spinal concussion she suffered in a 1902 carriage accident. She wrote important letters of advice to Cather in 1908, criticizing her decision to write "The Gull's Road" (1908) from the perspective of a male character, which she called "something of a masquerade" (27 Nov. 1908), and urging her to give up her editorial work at McClure's Magazine so she could focus full-time on fiction writing (13 Dec. 1908). After Jewett's death in South Berwick in 1909, Cather often referred to her and her advice about writing. Cather edited The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925) for publisher Houghton Mifflin, and in her preface classed The Country of the Pointed Firs with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as one of "three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life."

James, Henry (1843-1916). Expatriate American fiction writer and critic. Born in New York City to philosopher Henry James and Mary Robertson Walsh James, Henry, Jr., was educated in both the United States and Europe. After beginning his career in the U.S., he moved to Paris in 1875 and lived the rest of his life in Europe, primarily in England, but he also made regular extended trips to the Continent. James was influential as both a writer and a theorist of fiction and was known for fiction about Americans abroad and for representing the interior consciousness of his characters. In the Lincoln Courier in 1895, Willa Cather praised James as “that mighty master of language and keen student of human action and motives.” Cather followed James’s lead in many of her short stories of the 1890s and 1900s and in Alexander’s Bridge (1912); Witter Bynner, who worked for S. S. McClure, sent Cather’s story collection The Troll Garden (1905) to James. In “My First Novels [There Were Two],” however, Cather characterized her Jamesian phase as a false start. She never met James in person but narrowly missed meeting him at Annie Adams Fields’ summer home during his final visit to the U.S. in 1910-1911. James died in England, having renounced his American citizenship during World War I.