Oliver, John Rathbone (1872-1943). American author, priest, professor, and psychiatrist. Born in Albany, NY, John Oliver graduated from Harvard University (1894) and entered the General Theological Seminary, being ordained as an episcopal priest in 1900. He left the priesthood in 1903, perhaps owing to his identity as a gay man. Oliver earned a medical degree from the University of Innsbruck (1910), and served as the Chief Medical Officer for the Supreme Bench of Baltimore and a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University Hospital from 1917 to 1930. After earning his PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1927, he returned to the priesthood and taught the history of medicine at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins. Oliver wrote books about psychiatry as well as several novels, including the autobiographical Victor and Victim (1928), which was a contender for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Willa Cather accepted Alfred Knopf’s offer that he send to Grand Manan an Oliver novel he published, Priest or Pagan (1933) (#2663), about a young man torn between virtuous and sinful forces, who ultimately becomes a priest. Oliver died in Waverley, MA. Upon his death, Time magazine referred to him as “one of the most unusual and winning personalities of his time.”

Hambourg, Isabelle McClung (1877-1938). Cather’s longtime friend. Cather met Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a socially prominent, Pittsburgh (PA) family, in 1899 in the dressing room of actress Lizzie Hudson Collier. McClung seems to have been the first woman to reciprocate Cather’s romantic affections. In 1901, McClung invited Cather to live in her family’s large home in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. She and Cather traveled together to Europe in 1902, and McClung accompanied Cather on a visit home to Nebraska in 1905. After Cather moved to New York City in 1906, she frequently visited McClung in Pittsburgh, finding the familiar house a congenial place to write, and McClung visited New York City, staying with Cather and Edith Lewis. Cather and McClung also rented a vacation cabin in Cherry Valley, NY, in 1911, and traveled together to Virginia in 1913. In late 1915, shortly after the death of her father, Judge Samuel McClung, Isabelle announced her intention to marry violinist Jan Hambourg. Cather reacted negatively to the marriage (which took place in 1916) but eventually reconciled herself to it, enjoying long visits with the Hambourgs in Toronto, Ontario, in 1921 and France in 1923 and 1935. Cather and Edith Lewis also spent time with the Hambourgs in Paris is 1930 and 1935. The latter trip occurred after Isabelle sought treatment in the U.S. for the kidney disease that killed her several years later in Italy. Her death came only four months after Cather’s brother Douglass died, leaving her feeling bereft. “No other living person cared as much about my work, through thirty-eight years,” she wrote her brother Roscoe (#2137). After Isabelle’s death, Jan sent to Cather the six hundred letters from Cather to Isabelle in his possession, and Cather destroyed them, although a few letters from Isabelle and Cather postcards to Isabelle are extant.