Hollis Wordsworth Mason was Hollis Mason's grandfather, a farmer in Montana. He was a conservative and religious person, distrustful of the city folk. When Hollis Jr. was born, he was honored to see him given his own name and had a special concern for his moral upbringing. Apparently because of the amount of guilt, pressure and recrimination, his son decided to move with his family to New York, after a lot of arguments, since it was not the future Hollis had planned for them.