Greenslet, Ferris (1875-1959). American editor and writer. Born in Glens Falls, NY, Ferris Greenslet earned a BA (1897) from Wesleyan University and a PhD (1900) from Columbia University. He served as associate editor at the Atlantic Monthly from 1902 to 1907, and married Ella Stoothoff Hulst in 1903; they had two children, Marguerite (born 1904) and George (born 1906). As an author he specialized in biography. He became literary editor at Houghton Mifflin, the Boston publisher of the Atlantic, c. 1908 and was socially and professionally acquainted with Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett, who may have introduced him to Cather. He evidently solicited Cather to submit Alexander’s Bridge (1912), her first published novel, to Houghton Mifflin. In 1910, when Greenslet became editor in chief of the trade department, Roger Scaife divided his shares as a director of the company with him, and the two presented themselves to authors as partners, with Scaife handling book advertising and format and Greenslet negotiating contracts and supervising editing; when Greenslet was absent from the office, Scaife handled correspondence with Cather. Greenslet became a director of Houghton Mifflin in 1919 and manager of the trade department in 1933. Cather left Houghton Mifflin as a publisher for Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., because she became dissatisfied with the production and advertising of her books. However, she remained on cordial terms with Greenslet and undertook several projects for him after her departure. Her extant letters to him constitute one of the largest groups to a single correspondent.

Sanborn, John Pitts (1879-1941) (“Pitts”). American music critic, poet, and novelist. Born in Port Huron, MI, John Pitts Sanborn received a BA (1900) and MA (1902) from Harvard University. In 1905, he became the music editor of the New York Globe, a position that entailed summer European travel. Willa Cather read and admired his music criticism, calling him “the most musicianly musical critic I know” (#0310), and he became a regular at Friday tea at Five Bank Street. She was delighted to be the one to introduce Sanborn to opera diva Olive Fremstad in April 1915. In 1923 Sanborn left the Globe to become foreign correspondent for the Evening Mail, of which he subsequently became music editor. He continued on as music editor when the Mail merged with the New York Telegram. His novel Prima Donna: A Novel of the Opera (1929) was acclaimed as one of the great novels about opera, and his Metropolitan Book of the Opera (1937) became a standard reference for opera-goers. He died in his Greenwich Village apartment in the midst of writing a review of a Metropolitan Opera performance he had just attended.