Lewis, Sinclair (1885-1951). American novelist. Born in Sauke Centre, MN, Sinclair Lewis graduated from Yale University in 1908. Although he published short stories and several novels in the teens, he achieved critical and popular success with Main Street (1920), which satirized Midwestern provincialism. On a 1921 lecture tour, he regularly praised Cather’s work. He continued with a string of popular and critical successes, including Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925) (for which he declined the Pulitzer Prize for fiction), Mantrap (1926), and Elmer Gantry (1927). Even though he depicted One of Ours (1922) as a failure in his New York Evening Post review, Cather invited him to tea and said she was not “a particle sore at him” (#0624). Although they infrequently saw each other in person, they remained on good terms, and when Lewis was the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, he praised Cather in his acceptance speech. Lewis was married and divorced twice, first to Grace Livingston Hegger and then to Dorothy Thompson. Later, he lived with Rosemary Marcella Powers, whom Cather met. Lewis’s later career was marred by his alcoholism, which led to his death in Rome, Italy.

Cather, Elsie Margaret (1890-1964) (“Bobbie”). Cather’s sister. Born in Red Cloud, NE, shortly before Willa Cather graduated from high school, Elsie attended the University of Nebraska in Lincoln from 1908 to 1910, before transferring to Smith College, in Northampton, MA, from which she graduated with an A.B. in English and Latin in 1912. She undertook graduate study at the University of Nebraska in 1914 and in 1916 received her A.M. with a major in philosophy and a minor in English. At both the undergraduate and the graduate level at Nebraska, she studied under Louise Pound. She began a career in high school teaching in 1912, when she took a position in Lander, WY, where her brother Roscoe then lived with his family. She also taught in Albuquerque, NM; Corning, IA; Cleveland, OH; and briefly Red Cloud, when illness in the family brought her home. Her longest tenure as a teacher was at Lincoln (NE) High School, where she began teaching in 1920, with Olivia Pound and Mariel Gere as colleagues. Willa Cather's expectation that Elsie be responsible for aging family and friends and for legal affairs after their parents' deaths sometimes brought the sisters into conflict. Elsie Cather retired from Lincoln High School in 1942. She died in Lincoln.

Mellen, Mary Virginia Auld (1906-1982) (“Virginia,” “M.V.”). Cather's niece. Born in Red Cloud, NE, to Jessica Cather Auld and James William Auld, Mary Virginia graduated from Red Cloud High School in 1924 and then spent a year at Dana Hall in Wellesley, MA, to qualify for admission to Smith College in Northampton, MA. In 1929 she received an A.B. in psychology from Smith and then moved to New York City, where she found work at Lord & Taylor before telling her aunt of her arrival. In 1930, probably with Willa Cather's help, she secured a position in the Circulation Department of the New York Public Library. In 1931, she entered the library's internal training school and in 1932 was assigned to the Tremont branch library in the Bronx. After Mary Virginia’s parents divorced in 1933 Cather took a quasi-parental role. She paid for vacations and when, in 1935, Mary Virginia married Richard (Dick) Mellen, a graduate of Harvard Medical School and roommate of her brother William Thomas Auld at Amherst College, she supervised wedding arrangements. After Dick was commissioned as a doctor in the Air Force, Mary Virginia—much to Cather’s regret—accompanied him to Chattanooga, TN, where he was assigned. In Cather's will, Mary Virginia was designated a beneficiary of the literary estate.

Litchfield, Ethel Herr Jones (1876-after 1967). Pianist; Cather’s Pittsburgh friend. Born in New Brighton, PA, near Pittsburgh, to the Reverend David and Sarah Jones, Ethel traveled to Vienna, Austria, at age twenty to study with Theodor Leschetizky with the aim of becoming a concert pianist. However, Dr. Lawrence Litchfield followed her there to court her. They married in Vienna in 1898 and returned to Pittsburgh. They had three children, Ethel Carver (1899), Lawrence, Jr. (1900), and Margaret (1903). While her children were young, she largely gave up performing but entertained visiting musicians in their home in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, where Cather met them in 1902. Cather, May Willard, Ethel Litchfield, and Isabelle McClung formed, as Cather would later recall, a “little group” that “melted together” (#1540). It has been suggested that Litchfield’s decision to give up her musical career for marriage informed Cather’s story “The Garden Lodge” (1905). As Litchfield’s children grew older, however, she returned to the concert stage. After the 1930 death of her husband, she moved to New York City, where she dined frequently with Cather and Edith Lewis and enjoyed listening with them to recordings of Yehudi and Hepzibah Menuhin.