Early Life and Education
Phelps' father Sylvanus Dryden Phelps was a Baptist minister. William as a child was a friend of Frank Hubbard, the son of Langdon Hubbard, a lumber merchant who founded Huron City, Michigan. Phelps earned a B.A. in 1887, writing an honors thesis on the Idealism of George Berkeley. He earned his A.M. in 1891 from Yale and in the same year his PhD from Harvard. He taught at Harvard for a year, and then returned to Yale where he was offered a position in the English department. He taught at Yale the rest of life.
Phelps was engaged to marry Frank's sister Annabel when Langdon Hubbard died. Annabel inherited the family estate and William christened it "The House of the Seven Gables,” after the Nathanial Hawthorne story of the same name. Her father built the house in 1882 on a bluff overlooking Lake Huron. The couple was married on the estate on December 21, 1892 and it became their summer home.
Phelps converted the space in front of the house from a trotting track into a private 18-hole golf course in 1899. and they lived there part-time from 1893 through 1933, when he retired, and full-time through 1938. They had no children.
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