Matthiessen, Francis Otto (1902-1950). American educator, literary critic, and scholar. Born in Pasadena, CA, Matthiessen received an A.B. from Yale University (1919), a B. Litt. from Oxford University (1925), where he was a Rhodes scholar, and an MA and PhD from Harvard University (1926). During his years as an English instructor at Yale University from 1927 to 1929 he researched and wrote Sarah Orne Jewett (1929), published by Houghton Mifflin and featuring illustrations by his partner, painter Russell Cheney. Matthiessen and Cather briefly corresponded about his research for this book. From 1929 he rose quickly through the ranks at Harvard University and became one of the most influential scholars of American literature of his generation. He is best known for his book American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941).

Jewett, Mary Rice (1847-1930). Sarah Orne Jewett’s sister. Born in Exeter, NH, to Dr. Theodore Herman Jewett and Caroline Frances Perry Jewett, Mary was the older sister of Sarah Orne Jewett. They both attended Berwick Academy in Berwick, ME, and as adults they continued to live together in the family home in South Berwick, where Mary was active in a local women’s club and charitable work. On Sarah’s death, Mary and Annie Adams Fields became co-executors of Sarah’s literary estate. Cather’s friendship with Mary seems to date primarily from this period after Sarah’s death, and Cather made several visits to Mary at the Jewett family home in Maine. In 1924, with Mary Jewett’s approval, Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin asked Cather to select and write an introduction to Sarah Jewett’s stories. Shortly thereafter, Burton Rascoe reported critical remarks by Cather about Sarah Jewett’s works and the Jewett family in his “Bookman’s Day Book” column in the New York Tribune. Mary read these remarks as reprinted in the Boston Transcript, was offended, and sought to have Cather removed as editor of her sister’s works. However, Cather and Greenslet persuaded her to reverse this decision (Cather’s letters pleading her case have not been located). Mary Jewett died in South Berwick, and her nephew Theodore Jewett Eastman succeeded to the executorship of Sarah Jewett’s literary estate.

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.