Ickis, Elizabeth Cather (1915-1978) (half of the “twinnies”). Cather’s niece. Elizabeth and her twin sister Margaret 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. Elizabeth moved to Colusa, CA, with her parents in 1937 and married Lynn S. Ickis, an electrical engineer, in April 1938. They lived in Cleveland, OH, and had two children, Margaret and John.

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.

Alcott, Louisa May (1832-1888). American author. Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, PA, to Abigail May Alcott and Amos Bronson Alcott, and was raised in genteel poverty in Massachusetts. Her father was part of the American transcendentalist movement, and the family knew Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Alcott began writing in 1851 to contribute to the financial support of her family, publishing under various pseudonyms. Her experiences as a Civil War nurse inspired Hospital Sketches (1863). After its success, she began publishing short stories under her own name in Atlantic Monthly and Lady’s Companion. Cather read Little Women (1868) as a child and visited Orchardside, the Alcott family home in Concord, MA, in 1907 with Isabelle McClung. Cather found Katharine Anthony’s 1938 Freudian psychobiography of Alcott preposterous. She suggested to Henry Seidel Canby that letters from Alcott to her cousin Annie Adams Fields, which Cather destroyed at Fields’s request, might have disproven Anthony’s thesis (#1400).