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.

Cather, Charles Fectigue (1848-1928). Cather’s father. Charles Fectigue (possibly Fectique) Cather was born in the Back Creek Valley of Virginia, north of Winchester. His family were sheep raisers who were largely, but not entirely, Union supporters during the Civil War. He married Mary Virginia Seibert Boak, daughter of Confederate supporters, in 1872. In 1883 he and his family followed his parents, William and Caroline Cather, and brother George to Webster County in Nebraska, where various cousins and uncles had also settled. Initially he ran a ranch in the county but soon moved his family into the town of Red Cloud, where he had an insurance and real estate business. Four of his children, Willa, Roscoe, Charles, and Jessica, were born in Virginia, while three, James, Elsie, and John, were born in Nebraska. Cather’s relationship with her father was very warm: she made regular visits to her parents in Red Cloud and especially enjoyed her father’s letters expressing appreciation of her novels. A week after she concluded a visit to her ailing father in Red Cloud, he died of heart disease. He served as the prototype for Hillary Templeton in “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932).

Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941). British author and journalist. Born to Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep, Adeline Virginia Stephen was educated mostly at home and attended the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London from 1897 to 1901. After 1904 she became involved in the Bloomsbury Group circle of intellectuals and artists, which included Clive Bell, E. M. Forster, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, and Leonard Woolf, whom she would marry. Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and with her husband she founded the Hogarth Press in 1917. Woolf developed her experimental stream-of-consciousness narrative technique in her best-known novels, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928). Woolf committed suicide after a lifelong struggle with depression. Cather admired Woolf’s writing enough to wish that Knopf would publish her work in the U.S. (#2577).