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.

Jewett, Sarah Orne (1849-1909). American short story writer and novelist. Born in South Berwick, ME, Jewett began sharing homes in Boston (at 148 Charles Street) and Manchester-on-the-Sea, MA, with Annie Adams Fields in 1881, while continuing to live in her family home in South Berwick with her mother and sister part of the year. She was associated throughout her career with the Atlantic Monthly, and her best-known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, was serialized there in 1896. Like much of her fiction, it focused on rural and small town New England life. By the time Cather met Jewett at 148 Charles Street in 1908, Jewett had largely ceased writing because of a spinal concussion she suffered in a 1902 carriage accident. She wrote important letters of advice to Cather in 1908, criticizing her decision to write "The Gull's Road" (1908) from the perspective of a male character, which she called "something of a masquerade" (27 Nov. 1908), and urging her to give up her editorial work at McClure's Magazine so she could focus full-time on fiction writing (13 Dec. 1908). After Jewett's death in South Berwick in 1909, Cather often referred to her and her advice about writing. Cather edited The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925) for publisher Houghton Mifflin, and in her preface classed The Country of the Pointed Firs with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as one of "three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life."