Fernbacher, Margaret Ickis (1939- ). Cather's great niece. Born in Cleveland, OH, Margaret Ickis was the first child of Lynn Ickis and Elizabeth Cather Ickis (Willa Cather’s niece). In 1975, she married Frank Fernbacher, and the couple had one son, Michael. They lived for many years in Willoughby, OH. She likely met Willa Cather when she was a young child.

Knopf, Alfred A. (1892-1984). President of New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Knopf received his BA from Columbia University in New York City in 1912 and founded Alfred Knopf, Inc., in 1915 with his future wife Blanche Wolf. They married in 1916, and their son Alfred “Pat” Knopf was born in 1918. Cather chose him as her publisher beginning with Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920) and One of Ours (1922), partly because she was dissatisfied with the promotion of her books by Houghton Mifflin but also because she recognized the high quality of Knopf's books, as well as what she regarded as his intelligent advertising. Knopf was noted for publishing the work of leading European and South American writers in translation, as well as original works. Knopf and Cather’s extensive correspondence testifies to their mutual professional respect and to what also became an important personal friendship.

Lawrence, David Herbert (1885-1930) (“D.H.”). British novelist. Born in Nottingham, England, into a working-class family, Lawrence left high school in 1901 to work as a clerk, although he soon secured a position as a pupil teacher and earned his teacher’s certificate at the University of Nottingham. His first novel, The White Peacock (1911), was published by William Heinemann while he was still a schoolteacher. After a bout with pneumonia ended his teaching career, he met and fell in love with Frieda Weekley, the wife of one of his professors at Nottingham. Frieda left her husband and three young children to travel to Germany with Lawrence. After they had settled in Italy, Heinemann rejected Lawrence’s novel Paul Morel as indecent. The publisher Duckworth encouraged him to revise it, and published as Sons and Lovers (1913) it made his reputation. He and Frieda returned to England and married in London in 1914. Lawrence struggled to make a living: The Rainbow (1915) was ruled obscene and withdrawn from circulation, and Women in Love was repeatedly rejected by publishers before publication in 1920. After World War I he and Frieda returned to Italy, settling in Capri, where in 1921 they met expatriate American painters Earl Brewster and Achsah Barlow-Brewster, with whom they traveled to Ceylon in 1922. The Lawrences eventually traveled to the U.S. by sea to the west coast and spent time in New Mexico and Mexico before returning to Europe in early 1923. In July 1923, the Brewsters gave the Lawrences Cather and Edith Lewis’s address in New York City, and D. H. and Frieda, accompanied by Dorothy Brett, visited 5 Bank Street. From New York City the Lawrences and Brett traveled to New Mexico and settled on a small derelict ranch, which D.H. purchased from Mabel Dodge Luhan, and where he wrote fiction set in the U.S. Southwest and Mexico. During their July 1925 visit to Luhan’s compound in Taos, NM, Cather and Lewis visited the Lawrences at their ranch. The Lawrences soon returned to Europe, however, where D.H. died of tuberculosis. His literary reputation and fame increased after his death. Cather’s attitude towards him was ambivalent. She liked him personally, praised him as “unquestionably the most gifted writer of his generation” (#1118), and praised memoirs of him by Luhan and the Brewsters. However, in “The Novel Démeublé” (1922), she criticizes Lawrence for failing to distinguish between “emotion and mere sensory reactions” and reducing his characters in The Rainbow to “mere animal pulp.” “Can one imagine anything more terrible,” she queries, “than the story of Romeo and Juliet, rewritten in prose by Mr. Lawrence?”

Hardy, Thomas (1840-1928). British novelist and poet. Hardy’s novels are set in the semi-fictional rural region of Wessex and draw on his childhood experiences as the son of a family of modest means in a rural hamlet in Dorset, England. He moved to London in 1862 and worked as a draughtsman in an architect’s office before launching his career as a novelist in 1871, but moved back to Dorset as an established novelist. In Cather’s journalism of the 1890s and in her letters, she praises Hardy’s novels. She does not mention his poetry, however, to which he turned his attention and creative energies in 1898, continuing to publish poetry into the twentieth century. After his death Cather claimed several times that Hardy wrote letters to her praising her own novels, but these letters have not surfaced.