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.

Train, Arthur Cheney (1875-1945). American lawyer and author. Born and raised in Boston, MA, Train took his law degree at Harvard University in 1899. He moved to New York City to practice law and in 1905 began publishing magazine short stories based on his experiences in the New York District Attorney’s office. His lawyer hero, Ephraim Tutt, who first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1919, became immensely popular. From 1941 until his death, Train served as President of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, of which Cather was a member and which awarded her its gold medal for fiction in 1944.

Lewis, Sinclair (1885-1951). American novelist. Born in Sauke Centre, MN, Sinclair Lewis graduated from Yale University in 1908. Although he published short stories and several novels in the teens, he achieved critical and popular success with Main Street (1920), which satirized Midwestern provincialism. On a 1921 lecture tour, he regularly praised Cather’s work. He continued with a string of popular and critical successes, including Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925) (for which he declined the Pulitzer Prize for fiction), Mantrap (1926), and Elmer Gantry (1927). Even though he depicted One of Ours (1922) as a failure in his New York Evening Post review, Cather invited him to tea and said she was not “a particle sore at him” (#0624). Although they infrequently saw each other in person, they remained on good terms, and when Lewis was the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, he praised Cather in his acceptance speech. Lewis was married and divorced twice, first to Grace Livingston Hegger and then to Dorothy Thompson. Later, he lived with Rosemary Marcella Powers, whom Cather met. Lewis’s later career was marred by his alcoholism, which led to his death in Rome, Italy.

Cross, Wilbur (1862-1948). American scholar and state governor. Wilbur Cross was born in Connecticut and educated at Yale, where he earned a PhD in 1889. He became an English literature professor at Yale in 1894, specializing in the novel and editing the Yale Review (for which he solicited articles from Cather). An influential literary critic, Cross wrote an important review of Shadows on the Rock (1931), to which Cather replied in one of her few letters commenting on her work to be made public. After Cross’s retirement from Yale, he was elected governor of Connecticut, serving four two-year terms from 1931 to 1939.