Goudy, Alice Estelle Dailey (1853-1937). Cather’s high school teacher and friend. Alice Dailey grew up in Nemaha County, NE, where she attended the Nebraska State Normal School at Peru, NE, which her father had helped found. She married fellow teacher Alexander K. Goudy in 1882; both taught at the Normal School. When they moved to Red Cloud, NE, in 1888, he was superintendent of schools and she was the high school principal. She encouraged Cather to attend the University of Nebraska. The Goudys moved to Lincoln, NE, in 1891, when he was elected state superintendent of schools; Alice Goudy was assistant, then deputy, state superintendent. After A.K. Goudy suffered a stroke around 1900, the couple retired to Nemaha County. Cather wrote to Mrs. Goudy for many years, although few letters have survived.

Case, Eva King (1860-1907). American teacher and school administrator. Born in Vermont, Eva King and her family came to Webster County, NE, around 1877. In 1880 she earned the highest teaching certificate possible. In 1884 she became assistant principal of the Red Cloud School. As principal in early 1885, she interviewed and placed Willa Cather as a new student. Replaced as high school principal by a man, she became principal of Red Cloud’s first separate elementary school, which Cather also attended. In 1887 she was elected county superintendent, resigning in 1890 to marry attorney Oliver C. Case. She returned to teaching in 1892 but was placed in subordinate positions until 1898, when she was again elected county superintendent. After losing to a Populist candidate in 1901, she was appointed the city superintendent of schools, resigning after the death of her husband in 1904. She then became a “preceptress” at the Kearney Normal School until her death. Cather remembered her warmly all her life, portraying her as the understanding school superintendent in “The Best Years” (1948).

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.