Wilder, Thornton (1897-1975). American novelist and playwright. Born in Madison, WI, and educated partially abroad because his father was a diplomat, Wilder graduated from Yale University in 1920. His second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), a historical novel set in seventeenth-century Peru, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Leftist critics attacked his The Woman of Andros (1930), set in pre-Christian Greece, for avoiding contemporary life and the Great Depression. He responded with Heaven’s My Destination (1935), featuring a depression-era salesman of religious textbooks traveling across America. Our Town (1938), his play about the fictional Grovers Corners (modeled after Peterborough, NH), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in drama. In the summer of 1926 Cather and Wilder met when they were both residents of the MacDowell Writers’ Colony in Peterborough. She saw Our Town performed on Broadway and to playwright Zoë Akins praised Wilder’s “very fine” representation of New England life and his technique in getting a “fine poem…onto the stage successfully” (#1407). She wrote him a fan letter telling him she loved “everything you have ever written, but you have done nothing so fine” as Our Town (#2014). Except for a time working in military intelligence in World War II, Wilder continued to be an active playwright and novelist until the end of his life. He died in Hamden, CT.

Cather, Mary Virginia Boak (1850-1931) (“Virginia” or “Jenny”). Cather’s mother. Born in Virginia to William Lee Boak and Rachel Seibert Boak, Virginia was educated in Baltimore, MD, and was a schoolteacher until her marriage to Charles Fectigue Cather in 1872. Her husband’s family were primarily Union supporters during the Civil War while her family supported the Confederacy (three brothers served in the Confederate Army although their mother opposed slavery). After her marriage she tried to help unite the divided family. Four of her children, Willa, Roscoe, Charles Douglas, and Jessica Virginia, were born in Virginia, while three, James Donald, Elsie Margaret, and John Esten, were born in Nebraska after the family moved there in 1883. Despite occasional differences, Cather remained in affectionate contact with her mother, who remained in Red Cloud, NE, where the family settled in 1884. After her husband’s death in 1928 Virginia Cather suffered a stroke while visiting her children and their families in California. She spent nearly three years in a sanitarium in Pasadena, CA, unable to speak. Willa Cather visited her there several times but was unable to travel quickly enough from Grand Manan to Red Cloud for her funeral and interment after she died in Pasadena in 1931. Virginia Cather was the prototype for Victoria Templeton in “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932), which Willa Cather completed shortly before her mother’s death.