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.

Dickens, Charles (1812-1870). British writer and editor. Born in Portsmouth, England, Dickens spent part of his boyhood in rural Kent before the family moved to London, where his father was incarcerated in a debtors’ prison. Eleven-year-old Charles was put to work pasting labels on bottles, an experience which developed his sense of social justice. After time at a bad school, he became first a legal clerk and then a journalist reporting on the courts and politics. His Sketches by Boz (1836) and serially published Pickwick Papers (book publication 1837) established him as a successful fiction writer. He became the most popular novelist in England and much of the English-speaking world, drawing on many of his own experiences in such novels as David Copperfield (1850). In 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth, with whom he had ten children; they separated after he fell in love with a sixteen-year-old actress in 1857. Dickens toured the U.S. twice; his readings from his own work in England and abroad were very popular.