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.

Brown, Albert Curtis (1866-1945) (“Curtis”). Anglo-American journalist and literary agent. Born in upstate New York, Albert Curtis Brown worked as a journalist in Buffalo, NY, and New York City before moving to England in 1898 to head the International Publishing Bureau, a literary agency. In 1906 he and Hughes Massie left this firm to establish Curtis Brown and Massie, literary and dramatic publishing agents. Cather had dealings with this firm when she was an editor at McClure’s Magazine. In 1913 Massie and Brown parted ways, and Curtis Brown continued on under his own name. Houghton Mifflin engaged the firm to handle negotiations for British publication and some European translations of Cather’s works.

Llona, Florence Mildred Nelson (1901-1977). American translator. Born in Chicago, IL, Florence Nelson married Victor Llona, then living in Chicago, and moved with him to Paris, France, where their children Doris and Eric were born. In the 1920s and 1930s in collaboration with her husband and independently she translated prose fiction and nonfiction from English to French and from French to English. The couple later divorced.