Aaron, M. Manley. Alfred Knopf’s secretary. As secretary to the president of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., Willa Cather’s publisher, Manley Aaron was responsible for clerical matters, such as tracking Cather’s address as she traveled or mailing her supplies. However, Alfred Knopf also delegated to Aaron the task of negotiating with magazines for the publication of Cather’s short stories collected in Obscure Destinies (1932), and she took direct responsibility for other matters for Cather and other authors as well.

Brownell, Gertrude Hall (1863-1961) (“Kitty”). American writer and translator. Born in Boston, MA, Gertrude Hall published poetry and short fiction in the 1890s, and translated Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1898); later she translate Rostand’s Chantecler (1910) and Paul Verlaine’s poetry. She married critic William Crary Brownell in 1921. Cather first encountered Hall’s Wagnerian Romances, which retold the stories of Wagner’s opera, while in the Southwest, and, as Cather wrote in an introduction to Knopf’s 1925 edition of the book, it influenced the account of Thea Kronborg’s career in The Song of the Lark (1915). Cather appears to have known the Brownells socially in New York City.