Title
Clipped signature of William Allan Neilson
Description
William Torrey Harris’s successor as chief editor of Merriam’s flagship dictionary was William Allan Neilson, a Scottish poetry expert and Shakespeare scholar who, in 1917, became president of Smith College. In 1924, he accepted an invitation to become the chief editor of Webster’s Second New International (W2), saying, “There is probably no book that has been written in a hundred years that has done so much . . . for the country at large as [this] Dictionary.”
Source
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 100