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.

Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825-1895). British biologist and author. Born in Middlesex, England, to George and Rachel Huxley, Huxley had little formal education. After a medical apprenticeship he won a scholarship enabling him to study at the Charing Cross Hospital from 1842 to 1845. In 1846 he entered the navy and served as an assistant surgeon aboard the HMS Rattlesnake and studied sea organisms later described in his Oceanic Hydrozoa (1859). Upon returning to England, he was elected into the Royal Society of London and quickly became one of the leading scientists of his era. In 1856 he began a lifelong friendship with Charles Darwin. A prolific author of popular articles and textbooks, Huxley became known as “Darwin’s bulldog” because of his work to popularize theories of evolution and scientific naturalism. Cather considered Huxley one of the best scientific writers.

Brandeis, Louis Dembitz (1856-1941). American attorney and Supreme Court Justice. Born in Louisville, KY, to German Jewish parents who fled Austria after the Revolution of 1848, Brandeis was educated in Dresden, Germany, and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1875. In 1879 he and Samuel Warren established the law firm of Warren and Brandeis in Boston, MA. He married Alice Goldmark in 1891, and together they embraced progressive causes, especially labor reform. The National Consumers League, in which Alice’s sisters Pauline and Josephine were active, enlisted Louis Brandeis to argue Muller v. Oregon (1908), a case defending maximum working hours for women workers, before the U.S. Supreme Court; the “Brandeis brief,” consisting primarily of sociological data gathered by the Goldmark sisters rather than legal argument, revolutionized constitutional law. From 1905 to 1913, he battled in court against J.P. Morgan’s attempts to create a railroad monopoly by merging the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad with the Boston & Maine Railroad. President Woodrow Wilson appointed Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1916, and he served until 1939. Willa Cather met the Brandeises in 1907-1908 when she was on assignment for McClure’s Magazine and also spent time in the Brandeis home when she made later visits to Annie Fields. She last saw Louis Brandeis in New York City, where he was visiting the Goldmark family, in 1913.

Ober, Frank (1881-1960). Boston Orthopedic surgeon. Born in Mt. Desert, ME, Ober graduated from Tufts Medical School in Boston, MA, in 1905. He volunteered for service overseas in 1917 and spent two years as head of the orthopedic section of the U.S. Army Base Hospital No. 5 in France. On his return he rose from junior member of the visiting staff to chief orthopedic surgeon at Children’s Hospital in Boston and served as a clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard Medical School. About once a month he traveled to Philadelphia, PA, and New York City to see patients in consultation. In 1941, Cather was referred to Ober for her troubles with her right hand, and he prescribed and had constructed for her a metal and leather splint for her forearm and hand.