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.

Lewis, Edith Labaree (1881-1972). Magazine editor, advertising copywriter, and Cather's domestic partner. Born in Lincoln, NE, to Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Edith Lewis attended the preparatory school associated with the University of Nebraska, earning college credits from the University before transferring to Smith College in Northampton, MA, in 1899. She received an A.B. in English from Smith in 1902 and returned home to teach elementary school. She met Willa Cather in the summer of 1903 at the home of Sarah Harris, publisher of the Lincoln Courier. Moving to New York City soon afterward, Lewis settled into a studio on Washington Square and found work at the Century Publishing Company. Cather was her guest when she visited the city from Pittsburgh. In 1906, at Cather's suggestion, Lewis applied for a position as an editorial proofreader at McClure's Magazine, and the two women worked together on the McClure's staff for six years. In 1908, they moved into a shared apartment at 82 Washington Place, and then, in 1912, to Five Bank Street. Lewis left McClure's in 1915 to become managing editor of Every Week Magazine, where she stayed until the magazine folded in 1918. In 1919 she began a long career as an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Co. In 1926 Edith Lewis acquired the land on which she and Cather built their cottage on Grand Manan Island. When they lost their apartment on Bank Street to subway construction in 1927, they shared quarters at the Grosvenor Hotel when they were both in New York City. In 1932 they took an apartment at 570 Park Avenue. Throughout their relationship, Lewis was closely involved in Cather's creative process, reading and editing her work in pre-publication forms. Cather's will appointed Lewis as executor of her literary estate and a beneficiary of her literary trust. Lewis authorized E.K. Brown as Cather's first biographer and published her own memoir of Cather, Willa Cather Living (1953). She remained in their Park Avenue apartment after Cather's death and died there after a long period of illness and invalidism. She is buried at Cather's side in Jaffrey, NH.

Lowell, Amy (1874-1925). American poet, critic, and lecturer. Born into a wealthy and aristocratic family in Brookline, MA, Amy Lowell was educated at home and in boarding schools. After her debut in 1891, she continued a rigorous course of self study in her father’s enormous library and became an avid book and manuscript collector, especially of materials by or relating to British Romantic poet John Keats. Lowell began writing poetry in 1902; her first book of poetry, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, appeared in 1912, the same year she met actress Ada Dwyer Russell, who left the stage to share with her the grand Lowell family estate, Sevenels. On a visit to Annie Fields in Boston, MA, around 1912 or 1913, Willa Cather accompanied Professor George Woodberry of Columbia University to Sevenels to view Lowell’s Keatsiana; the details of the visit are in dispute, but it did not go well. In 1914 Lowell traveled to England to meet Ezra Pound and to learn about free verse and imagism, the poetic movement he founded, but they soon came into conflict when she assumed a leading role. Lowell was a prolific poet and popularizer of modern verse, traveling widely to lecture and read her poetry. What’s O’Clock (1925), edited by Russell, was published after her death from a cerebral hemorrhage and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Improbably, in 1928 Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin asked Cather to write a short biography of Lowell; she declined.

Keats, John (1795-1821). British poet. Born in London, England, to Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats, John Keats was educated at the Enfield Academy. Apprenticed to a surgeon in 1811, in 1814 he became a junior house surgeon at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ hospitals. Best known as a Romantic lyric poet, during his short life Keats published three volumes of poetry, the first of which was Poems by John Keats (1817). Cather was a Keats enthusiast. She alludes to Keats in her works, including in “A Death in the Desert” (1903). Annie Fields arranged for Cather and George Woodberry to view Amy Lowell’s famous private collection of Keats letters and manuscripts c. 1913, but Lowell refused to allow them to touch the documents (#1595). When Fields died, she bequeathed her bust of Keats to Cather.