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.

Phillips, John Sanborn (1861-1949). American publisher. Born in Illinois, John S. Phillips attended Knox College in Galesburg, IL, where he met Samuel S. McClure. In 1887 McClure hired Phillips to manage the newspaper syndicate he had founded in 1884. In 1890, Phillips married Jennie Beale Peterson; the couple had five children. In 1893 McClure and Phillips founded McClure’s Magazine, of which Phillips was co-editor, and in 1900 they founded the publishing house of McClure, Phillips, which published Willa Cather’s short story collection The Troll Garden (1905). In 1906 Phillips split with McClure, and, Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens joined him in creating the American Magazine; their departure led McClure to hire Cather as an editor at McClure’s. In 1918 Phillips became editor of the Red Cross Magazine, the official organ of the Red Cross; Cather published two essays in the magazine in 1919.

Macpherson, Eugenia Commandeur Hunt (c.1865-?). Wife of Ewan Macpherson. Born in Indiana, Eugenia Commandeur Hunt married the American journalist and writer Ewan Charles Macpherson in Louisville, KY, in 1894. She moved with her husband to New York City in 1900, and spent time with him in Pittsburgh, PA, where he was editor of the literary journal The Library, in which Willa Cather published several stories, including “The Affair at Grosvenor Station.”