# The Professor’s House — Character guide

> Key figures in The Professor’s House by Willa Cather.

- [Professor St. Peter](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_professor_s_house_se/characters/st_peter.md): Godfrey St. Peter has spent decades building his eight-volume Spanish history and a household that now feels foreign to him. When his daughters marry into money and his wife turns her energies toward their sons-in-law, h
- [Tom Outland](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_professor_s_house_se/characters/tom_outland.md): Tom Outland walks into St. Peter's life with a Stetson hat, a canvas telescope, and fifty lines of the Aeneid on his tongue, having read Latin with a Belgian missionary priest instead of attending high school. His manly,
- [Lillian St. Peter](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_professor_s_house_se/characters/lillian_st_peter.md): Lillian has always kept the St. Peter household free of shabbiness and ugly compromises, but since Rosamond's marriage to Louie Marsellus she has changed and hardened, throwing herself into the social world of Hamilton w
- [Rosamond](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_professor_s_house_se/characters/rosamond_st_peter.md): Rosamond was married before her younger sister Kathleen, and her union with the wealthy, effusive Louie Marsellus has transformed both her circumstances and her character. She is building an ambitious country house on La
- [Kathleen](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_professor_s_house_se/characters/kathleen_st_peter.md): Kathleen married before Rosamond, and her husband Scott McGregor is a restless, jealous man who prowls among the books at family gatherings. She is pale and spirited, with wide cheekbones and a figure her father likens t
- [Louie Marsellus](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_professor_s_house_se/characters/louie_marsellus.md): Louie Marsellus is generous, demonstrative, and utterly unlike anyone else in the St. Peter family circle—he kisses his mother-in-law on the cheek at faculty receptions, hurries audibly through his soup, and arranges ela
- [Scott McGregor](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_professor_s_house_se/characters/scott_mcgregor.md): Scott McGregor is the Professor's neighbor and son-in-law, an artist who needles the Marselluses' new wealth while cheerfully refusing to be impressed by anyone. He treats St. Peter's stubborn attachment to the shabby ol
- [Augusta](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_professor_s_house_se/characters/augusta.md): Augusta has dressed the St. Peter women for years and knows the family's rhythms better than most of its members. Her running argument with the Professor about the Church—she scolds him for slighting remarks his students
- [Rodney Blake](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_professor_s_house_se/characters/rodney_blake.md): Rodney Blake met Tom Outland in a railroad camp and took him under his wing after nursing him through pneumonia, then threw up his job so the two could ride the Sitwell range together. A man who can do anything for someb
- [Henry Atkins](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_professor_s_house_se/characters/henry_atkins.md): An old man who works for the St. Peters, often seen in the garden.
- [Mrs. Crane](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_professor_s_house_se/characters/mrs_crane.md): Mrs. Crane comes to the old house in the rain, wearing her daughter's hat, to argue that her ailing husband deserves a share of the Outland patent. Married to a man no one else thought of courting, raising three plain da
- [Dr. Crane](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_professor_s_house_se/characters/dr_crane.md): Dr. Crane is a poor, ailing scientist whose health has crippled the family finances and whose quiet assistance to Tom Outland went formally unrecognized in Tom's will. His wife speaks for him—without his knowledge—insist
- [Father Duchene](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_professor_s_house_se/characters/father_duchene.md): Father Duchene is the priest Tom turns to for books and conversation in the rough railroad town, a man of genuine erudition who takes the boy's hunger for knowledge seriously. He advises Tom to give up night work and liv
- [Bill Hook](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_professor_s_house_se/characters/bill_hook.md): A member of Tom Outland's crew in the Southwest.
- [John Rapp](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_professor_s_house_se/characters/john_rapp.md): A man connected to the Crane family and the legal dispute.
- [Dr. Ripley](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_professor_s_house_se/characters/dr_ripley.md): A doctor mentioned in the narrative.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_professor_s_house_se/characters