Cather, Roscoe (1877-1945) (“Ross”). Cather’s brother. Roscoe was born in Virginia, the second child and oldest son of Charles and Virginia Cather. After graduating from Red Cloud (NE) High School in 1895, he taught country school for two years, attended the University of Nebraska in Lincoln for one year (1897-1898), taught high school in Carlton, NE, and Oxford, NE, and finally became superintendent of schools in Fullerton, NE. There he met fellow teacher Meta Schaper, whom he married in 1907. They relocated to Lander, WY, in 1909, where he opened an abstract office and where their three children, Virginia and twins Margaret and Elizabeth, were born. In 1921, they moved to Casper, WY, where Roscoe became president of the Wyoming Trust Company, and in 1937 to Colusa, CA, where Roscoe and his brother Douglass had acquired a controlling interest in the First Savings Bank of Colusa. Roscoe served as president of the bank until his death. Willa visited Roscoe and his family in Wyoming several times and shared important travel experiences with them, including a 1926 trip to New Mexico with Roscoe, Meta, and their children and a 1941 San Francisco vacation with Roscoe and Meta. She also relied on him to handle family-related business as well as personal financial matters, and he was one of her chief correspondents throughout her life. Roscoe served as a prototype for one of the twin brothers in the Templeton family in “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932).

White, William Allen (1868-1944). American newspaper editor and fiction writer. As the editor and publisher of the Emporia Gazette, White had an audience and influence far beyond the small town of Emporia, KS. He married Sallie Lindsay in 1893 and they bought the Gazette in 1895, with his wife working with him on all aspects of producing the paper. His fiery anti-Populist editorial “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”, published during the 1896 presidential campaign, made his national reputation, although his politics later shifted from his early conservative Republicanism. Dubbed the “Sage of Emporia” by H.L. Mencken for his widely reprinted editorials, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for an editorial advocating free speech. He began publishing short stories about small-town life in the 1890s, including in McClure’s Magazine; Cather later remembered reading his “Court of Boyville” stories with her brother Roscoe and marveling that a man from Kansas had been able to publish them in McClure’s (#2242). White stopped writing fiction after the failure of his novel In the Heart of a Fool (1918), however. In the Nation Randolph Bourne praised My Ántonia (1918) while denigrating the “swollen bulk” and “stale brightness of conversation” in White’s fiction. Cather approved Bourne’s comparison, dismissing White’s “jocular, familiar, grapenutsy way” of presenting his subject matter that “really presents…his own essentially vulgar personality” (#2085). Cather’s correspondence with White commenced in 1919. She later asked him to review One of Ours (1922), suggesting that although she had few “readers in Nebraska or Kansas,” the novel was for her “home people,” who would be persuaded by his opinion (#0603). He apparently did not review the novel, but they met when he visited New York City in October 1922 and maintained a cordial correspondence until his death.

Shannon, Margaret Cather (1915-1996) (half of the “twinnies”). Cather’s niece. Margaret and her twin sister Elizabeth were born in Lander, WY, to Roscoe and Meta Cather, and moved with the family to Casper, WY, in 1921. Elizabeth and Margaret both attended the University of Colorado, graduating in 1937, and visited Willa Cather and Edith Lewis on Grand Manan during the summers of 1936 and 1937. In Cather’s later letters to them, she often refers back to their summer visits as a magical time. Margaret moved to Colusa, CA, with her parents in 1937. After she married Richard Shannon in September 1938, she moved with him to Boston, MA, where he earned an MBA from Harvard University in Cambridge. In 1940 they moved to the New York City area, where their first child, Richard, was born in 1943. The Shannons moved to Washington, DC, in 1944, where their daughter Kathryne was born. Cather did not see Margaret again after she left New York, and Margaret’s other three children, Patricia, Margaret, and Elizabeth, were born after Cather’s death. Kathryne and Patricia became caretakers for a large family archive of letters preserved by their mother, which they donated to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as the Roscoe and Meta Cather Collection.