This book came across my desk at work and this paragraph is too good not to share.

From Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker by Kathleen Brady:

“There was a new writer on staff [at McClure’s Magazine], a former teacher in her late twenties, who had lived in Virginia and Nebraska and acquired the worst accents of both. Only McClure and Roseboro liked her. The rest thought Willa Cather a disgruntled “yes-man,” according to Curtis Brady, one of several Brady brothers on the business staff. Cather wanted to meet Ida Tarbell, the woman writer who had made a name for herself but Tarbell had no time. Ida “didn’t cotton to her, nor discount her either,” according to Roseboro. In later years, Tarbell expressed great admiration for Death Comes for the Archbishop and defended Cather’s way of guarding her privacy to protect her working hours” (134).

Cather with Ida Tarbell years later in 1924 when Cather was 51 and Tarbell 67.
From L to R: S.S. McClure, Cather, Tarbell, Will Irwin.
[Source: Willa Cather Archive DOI #519]