Burroughs, Ella Louise Guerber (1900-1985) (“Louise”). American librarian and curator. Ella Louise Guerber was born in Allentown, PA, and graduated from Cedar Crest College in 1919 and then the library school at Columbia University. At the time she met Cather in 1925, she was a reference librarian at the Denver Public Library and assisted Cather with her research on Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). In 1926, Guerber moved to New York City to take a position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she saw Cather frequently in person. She married Bryson Burroughs, Curator of Paintings, in 1928; he died in 1934. In 1950, when she received an honorary degree from Cedar Crest, she was Associate Curator of Paintings at the Met. After her retirement, she moved to Baltimore, MD, and then Princeton, NJ, where she died. Her friendship with Cather is documented by more than seventy letters from Cather to Burroughs from 1925 through Cather’s late life and by a diary documenting her in-person interactions with Cather from 1925 through 1927.

Phillpotts, Eden (1862-1960). English writer. Born in India, son British army officer Henry Phillpotts and Adelaide Waters Phillpotts, Eden Phillpotts grew up in Devonshire, England, where many of his later works were set. After working in an insurance office in his youth, he turned to writing. A prolific writer, by the 1890s he was averaging several books a year—novels, plays, short stories, and poetry. One of his novels became a successful play (The Farmer’s Wife, 1916), a radio broadcast, two movies (one by Alfred Hitchcock), and a television drama. Some of his work appeared in McClure’s; later Cather read at least one of his mystery novels, but dismissed it.