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.

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey (1836-1907). American writer. Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in Portsmouth, NH, to Elias Taft and Sarah Abba Bailey Aldrich. He published his first poem in the Portsmouth Journal in 1852, and in 1855 he published “The Ballad of Babie Bell,” which was received so well that he was able to begin working full-time as a writer. In 1968 he published his most famous work, The Story of a Bad Boy, a largely autobiographical novel which depicts the adventures of a young boy in an unidealized way. Along with fiction and poetry, Aldrich also devoted a great deal of his writing career to journalism, serving as the junior literary critic for the Evening Mirror and as an editor for Home Journal, Saturday Press, and the Atlantic. In a 1908 letter to Ferris Greenslet, Cather mentions enjoying Greenslet’s The Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1908).