McClure, Samuel Sidney (1857-1949) (“S.S.”). Irish-born American publisher. McClure immigrated to the U.S. at age nine, living with his family in Indiana. Despite poverty and the limited education he had received in Ireland, he graduated from high school and then Knox College in Illinois. He then moved to Boston, MA, where from 1882 to 1884 he edited the Wheelman, a bicycling magazine. Despite opposition from her parents, he married his Knox College classmate Harriet Hurd in 1883. The couple had four biological children (Eleanor, Bess, Mary, and Robert), and adopted one (Enrico). In 1884, S.S. started McClure’s Syndicate, which placed fiction in newspapers across the country. In 1893 with his college classmate John Sanborn Phillips he started McClure's Magazine, which was best-known for the "muckraking" exposés by writers such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens, but which also published literature. After his cousin H.H. McClure, who worked for the McClure Syndicate, brought Cather to S.S. McClure’s attention, McClure, Phillips & Co. brought out Cather’s first book of fiction, The Troll Garden (1905). When most of the editorial staff, including Steffens and Tarbell, resigned from McClure’s in 1906, he hired Cather as an editor; she later became managing editor. After she left her position at McClure’s in 1912 and when S. S. McClure had lost control of the magazine still bearing his name, Cather ghost wrote his autobiography (McClure’s serial 1913-1914, book publication 1914). McClure made repeated—and ultimately failed—attempts to reestablish himself in journalism and magazine publishing, often trying to enlist Cather in these enterprises. She almost went with him to Europe in 1915 to report on the war for the Evening Mail, and she remained personally loyal to her mercurial and often-irresponsible former employer. He served as the prototype for Marcus O’Mally, editor of the Outcry, in her story “Ardessa” (1918), and it has been suggested that Cather modeled the courtship and marriage between Myra and Oswald Henshaw in My Mortal Enemy (1926) on that of the McClures.

Wells, Benjamin E. (1845-1912). Newspaper editor; husband of Georgine Milmine. Born in Warren County, NY, elder son of farmer Joel Wells and Frances Rogers Wells, Benjamin Wells graduated from the State Normal College in Albany, NY, in 1864. He taught for a year before going into newspaper work. He became managing editor of the Syracuse (NY) Herald in 1884, and later of the Auburn Citizen in Auburn, NY. He married Georgine Milmine, who had worked at the Herald, in 1905; they lived in Auburn until his death.

Rapin, René (1899-1973). Swiss professor of literature in English. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, René Rapin graduated from the Lausanne Academy in 1921. He began teaching phonetics and English translation at the University of Lausanne in 1924. In 1926 he married Mary Coe Reeves of Connecticut; they had two daughters, Isabelle, born 1927, and Annette, born 1929. In 1930 he published Willa Cather, one of the first European studies of Cather’s works. After World War II he spent a year in Connecticut; returning to Lausanne, he became a professor of English and American literature, becoming chair of the department in 1956. Rapin also published on Joseph Conrad and Emily Dickinson, as well as on Shakespeare and some seventeenth century writers.

Van Doren, Carl Clinton (1885-1950). American writer and critic. Born in Illinois, son of Charles L. Van Doren and Eudora Butz Van Doren, Carl graduated from the University of Illinois in 1907, and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1911. There he met fellow graduate student Irita Bradford; they married in 1912 and had three daughters before divorcing in 1935. Van Doren taught at Columbia from 1911 to 1930; he served as literary editor of the Nation (1919-1922) and the Century (1922-1925). His study, The American Novel (1920) became an influential text; an article on Cather he wrote for the Nation in 1921 was included in his Contemporary American Novelists (1922). Van Doren’s biography of Benjamin Franklin won a Pulitzer in 1939. Cather included him in invitations to tea at Bank Street and allowed him to use a chapter from The Song of the Lark in an anthology.

Dickinson, Asa Don (1876-1960). American librarian and editor. Asa Don Dickinson was born in Detroit, MI, to Asa De Zeng and Harriet Sprague Dickinson. After graduating from Brooklyn Latin School, Dickinson earned a degree from the New York State Library School at Albany. He worked as a librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library (1903-1906), the Union College Library (1906-1907), the Leavenworth Public Library (1907-1910), and the Washington State College Library (1910-1912). From 1912 to 1918 he worked on the editorial staff of Double Day Page and Co., and in 1918 he distributed roughly one million books to American soldiers in France through his work with the American Library Association. Over the course of his career he also wrote and edited books such as Europe at War (1914), The Punjab Library Primer (1917), and Best Books of Our Time (1928). In a 1944 letter, Sarah Bloom, writing on behalf of Cather, recommended Dickinson’s Best Books of Our Time (1928) to critic Edward Wagenknecht.

Lawrence, Margaret (1896-1973). Canadian journalist, editor, and author. Born in Toronto, Canada, to Annie Elizabeth Ash Mitchell Lawrence and James Lawrence, Margaret Lawrence graduated from the University of Toronto in 1920. She then worked as a freelance writer and later as a literary and associate editor for the Canadian Home Journal and as a staff member of the Consolidated Press. In 1932 she lectured extensively throughout Canada on the feminist movement. Lawrence’s books include Mediums and Mystics (1923), Sieur de La Salle (1930), and Love Letters to Baruch (published posthumously in 1973). Cather liked Lawrence’s criticism of her work in School of Femininity (1936), “not chiefly because it is flattering, but because the writer says what she says in few words” (#1455).

Bloom, Sarah J. (1889-1961). Cather's personal secretary. Born in New York in 1889 to Russian immigrants Solomon and Bertha Bloom, Sarah J. Bloom worked for Cather from some time in the 1920s until Cather's death and continued to work for Edith Lewis on matters pertaining to Cather's literary estate thereafter. Bloom typed Cather's literary manuscripts and managed Cather's correspondence, typing dictated letters and sometimes responding for Cather when she was traveling. Bloom’s work for Cather supplemented full-time office employment in New York City (for many years she worked for the New York State Public Service Commission). She thus came to Cather and Lewis's apartment on weekends to take dictation, pick up and deliver typescripts, and deliver typed letters for signature. She died in New York city in 1961.