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.

Wharton, Edith (1862-1937). American author. Born Edith Newbold Jones to well-to-do fashionable parents from old New York City families and educated at home, she married Edward Robbins Wharton in 1885. Unhappy in her marriage (she divorced her husband in 1913), she pursued authorship, first writing about interior decoration and travel and then short stories. The publication of The House of Mirth (1905), her second novel, marked her emergence as a major novelist and solidified an important friendship with Henry James. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence (1920). Wharton completed construction of “The Mount” in Lenox, MA, in 1902 but primarily lived in France. Critics often classed Cather and Wharton together as the best American women novelists of their time—a comparison that also appeared in promotional copy for Cather’s novels—but there is no evidence that they ever met. Cather’s occasional public statements about Wharton suggest ambivalence, as when in “My First Novels (There Were Two)” (1932) she classes Wharton with James as novelists she imitated in Alexander’s Bridge (1912).

Young, George Washington (1864-1926). American financier; Lillian Nordica’s husband. Born in New Jersey of Irish parents, Young worked his way up from clerical jobs to vice-president and treasurer of the United States Mortgage and Trust Company at twenty-eight. He later founded his own bank, George Young & Co. He divorced his first wife in 1908 and married opera singer Lillian Nordica in 1909. Nordica made a will in Young’s favor, then made another shortly before her death, leaving him nothing, saying she had advanced him $400,000. He contested this will. Young threatened to sue Cather over her story “The Diamond Mine” (1916), in which the singer heroine’s husband is a fortune hunter.