Hendrick, Burton Jesse (1870-1949). American magazine writer, editor, and biographer. Hendrick graduated from Yale in 1895 and worked as a newspaper journalist until 1905, when he became a staff writer at McClure’s Magazine. Cather blamed him for errors in the first serialized installment in McClure’s of a biographical exposé of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. In 1913 Hendrick became associate editor of the World’s Work, a public affairs magazine founded by Walter Hines Page. Having won the Pulitzer Prize in biography as co-author of Victory at Sea (1921) and author of The Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page (1922), he left the magazine in 1927 to pursue writing biographies and histories, winning a third Pulitzer for a follow-up Page biography. Doubleday, Page, and Company, of which Walter Page was a partner, published all of Hendrick’s books.

Jewett, Mary Rice (1847-1930). Sarah Orne Jewett’s sister. Born in Exeter, NH, to Dr. Theodore Herman Jewett and Caroline Frances Perry Jewett, Mary was the older sister of Sarah Orne Jewett. They both attended Berwick Academy in Berwick, ME, and as adults they continued to live together in the family home in South Berwick, where Mary was active in a local women’s club and charitable work. On Sarah’s death, Mary and Annie Adams Fields became co-executors of Sarah’s literary estate. Cather’s friendship with Mary seems to date primarily from this period after Sarah’s death, and Cather made several visits to Mary at the Jewett family home in Maine. In 1924, with Mary Jewett’s approval, Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin asked Cather to select and write an introduction to Sarah Jewett’s stories. Shortly thereafter, Burton Rascoe reported critical remarks by Cather about Sarah Jewett’s works and the Jewett family in his “Bookman’s Day Book” column in the New York Tribune. Mary read these remarks as reprinted in the Boston Transcript, was offended, and sought to have Cather removed as editor of her sister’s works. However, Cather and Greenslet persuaded her to reverse this decision (Cather’s letters pleading her case have not been located). Mary Jewett died in South Berwick, and her nephew Theodore Jewett Eastman succeeded to the executorship of Sarah Jewett’s literary estate.

Grant, Ulysses S. (1822-1885). American general and president. Born in Ohio, son of Jesse Grant and Hannah Simpson Grant, Ulysses Grant graduated from the military academy at West Point in 1843. In 1848, after serving in the US-Mexico War, he married Julia Dent, sister of a classmate; they had four children. Grant rejoined the army at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, rising rapidly to become commander of the Union armies in 1864, and, forcing Confederate General Robert E. Lee to surrender in April 1865. Grant was elected president in 1868, serving two terms. In the 1880s, facing financial difficulties and cancer, Grant wrote his memoirs, finishing in 1885 a few days before his death. The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, read by Cather’s father and possibly by Cather herself, were an immense success.