Irene Miner Weisz and her sisters Carrie Miner Sherwood and Mary Miner Creighton were childhood friends of Willa Cather in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Among other activities the Miner girls and Cather put on plays to entertain friends and families, and as the years passed they remained friends and correspondents. Irene Miner married Charles W. Weisz and spent her adult life in Chicago.

Although born in Virginia in 1873, Willa Cather was transplanted to Nebraska when she was nine. This transition from the orderly South to the pioneering frontier of the Great Plains made a lasting impression on her and in her cultured but rather tomboyish youth she observed and became familiar with immigrant farm families struggling to conquer a sometimes hostile environment. The kinship she felt for the new Americans of Nebraska was later reflected in much of her fiction, notably in two of her best-known novels, O Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918).

Cather graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1895 and began a career first as a teacher and then as a magazine editor, finally settling in New York City in 1906 as editor of McClure's Magazine. During these years she traveled a good deal, developing a special affection both for France and the American Southwest -- the latter described lovingly in the novel Death Comes to the Archbishop -- and then in 1912 she decided to concentrate on supporting herself as free-lance author. What followed was a life dedicated to writing, one in which she published twelve novels and fifty-eight short stories that brought her much popularity and numerous honors and prizes.

Cather never married but she developed and maintained many close and enduring friendships. Some of these, as with the Miner sisters dating from her early life in Red Cloud, Nebraska, lasted all her life. Though in her later years she suffered from bouts of poor health, writing remained her passion and she continued to publish, concluding with Saphira and the Slave Girl in 1940.

Willa Cather, generally regarded as one of the twentieth century's major American writers, died in New York in 1947.