Sedgwick, Ellery (1872-1960). American magazine editor. Born in New York City to parents from a distinguished New England family, Ellery Sedgwick graduated from Harvard University in 1894. He was assistant editor of the Youth’s Companion (1896-1899) and then editor of Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly (1900-1906—renamed Leslie’s Monthly then American Illustrated Magazine). He worked from 1906 to 1907 at McClure’s Magazine and briefly as a book editor at D. Appleton and Company; in 1909 he began his long run as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, which he had bought in 1908. Cather evidently first met Sedgwick when they both worked at McClure’s, although she may also have encountered him at the home of Annie Adams Fields in Boston. When Sedgwick wrote to Cather soliciting a review of Memories of a Hostess: A Chronicle of Eminent Friendships, Drawn Chiefly from the Diaries of Mrs. James Fields (1922, edited by MA DeWolfe Howe), she identified the Atlantic as “the only American magazine I read” (#3021). She also published the poem “Poor Marty” (1931) and the essay “A Chance Meeting” (1933) in the Atlantic. Sedgwick’s wife Mabel, whom he married in 1904, died in 1937. He sold the Atlantic in 1939, the same year he married Marjorie Russell. He died in Washington, DC.

Balzac, Honoré de (1799-1850). French novelist and playwright. Born in France to an aspiring artisan and merchant class family, Balzac studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and then trained as a lawyer. Despite pressure from his family, he gave up law to pursue authorship, first writing plays and then novels. His first great success was La Comédie Humaine, a series of stories, novels, and essays ultimately running to ninety-one volumes and encompassing French society from the early through mid nineteenth-century. Balzac was a formative figure in the French realist tradition, and Cather referred to him frequently in her journalistic writings, criticism, fiction, and letters. In The Song of the Lark (1915), Dr. Archie has many volumes of Balzac in his library, telling Thea Kronborg that “A Frenchman undertook to write about a whole cityful of people, all the kinds he knew,” and characterizes the result “interesting.” In her essay “The Novel Démeublé” (1922), however, Cather dismissed Balzac’s attempt “to reproduce the actual city of Paris” as “unworthy of an artist.”

Hall, James Norman (1887-1951). American novelist. Hall was born and raised in Iowa, but moved to Tahiti at the conclusion of World War I. He collaborated with Charles Nordhoff to write adventure stories based in the South Pacific. Their most successful novel, Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), was later turned into a movie. Hall was also a frequent contributor to both the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine.

Frost, Robert (1874-1963). American poet and educator. Cather recognized and praised Frost's first two volumes of poetry, A Boy's Will (1913; 1915 in the U.S.) and North of Boston (1914 in both England and the U.S.) as early as 1915. She wrote him a letter of admiration that year in which she recognized the combination of newness with traditional elements that is still regarded as characteristic of Frost's work. After having met Frost and his wife, she attended a dinner in honor of his birthday in 1925. Like Cather, Frost is often seen as a transitional figure between late-Victorian and modernist styles. He used traditional forms and meter and his primary subject matter was rural New England, but he wrote with a directness and use of vernacular that identifies him with the "New American Poetry." Frost taught at Amherst College (Amherst, MA) from 1916 to 1938 and was awarded four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry.