Roseboro’, Viola (1857-1945). American editor and author. Born in Pulaski, TN, to parents whose abolitionist sympathies caused them to flee the state shortly before the Civil War, Viola Roseboro’ graduated from Fairmount College in Monteagle, TN. Before moving to New York City around 1882, she was an actress with a traveling stock company. In New York she worked as a journalist and began publishing short stories in magazines while continuing to tour occasionally until she left the stage permanently in 1887. Roseboro’ actively published fiction for the rest of her life, including The Joyous Heart (1903), a Civil War novel critical of Southern slavery, and Players and Vagabonds (1904), a collection of stories about the theater. Having sold short stories to the McClure fiction syndicate in the 1880s, in the early 1890s she began evaluating manuscripts for the syndicate and soon did the same for McClure’s Magazine and book publisher McClure, Phillips & Co. Cather evidently first met Roseboro’ in 1903, when S.S. McClure called her to New York to discuss her fiction; the two women began corresponding, and Roseboro’ may have influenced McClure’s decision to hire Cather as an editor for his magazine in 1906. When most of the magazine editorial staff walked out on McClure that year, Roseboro’ stayed, but when S.S. McClure lost control of the magazine in 1911, she left for Collier’s Weekly. When her position there ended, she moved to Staten Island and struggled to support herself as an author’s consultant. When S.S. McClure regained control of his magazine in 1921, she rejoined the staff and took an apartment at 13 Bank Street, but the position did not last long and she was soon struggling to support herself again; a 1928 bequest from a friend alleviated her financial distress and allowed her to live comfortably abroad and in New Dorp on Staten Island. Cather’s letters to Roseboro’ suggest that, long after she became an established author, Cather valued Roseboro’s friendship and her judgment in literary matters. She particularly valued Roseboro’s response as a Southerner to Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), an advance copy of which she sent to her.

Kipling, Rudyard (1865-1936). English fiction writer and poet. Born in Bombay, India, to English parents, Kipling was sent to England for his education but returned to India to work as a journalist. His poems and short stories about India won him an audience in England, and he settled in London in 1889. When he married Caroline Balestier in 1892, the couple moved to her home state of Vermont. In 1896 Willa Cather claimed to have met Kipling and she described the “46 minutes” of conversation with him as “alone worth” her move to Pittsburgh to work for the Home Monthly (#0028). In 1899, Cather wrote a column about his career for the Lincoln Courier, in which she noted the irony of Kipling trying to “live a respectable Puritan life in Vermont and be a full-fledged family man,” urging him to “Go back east.” In 1899, he did leave the U.S., but for London, not India, where he remained the rest of his life. McClure’s Magazine published Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) and the novel Kim (1900-1901), paying him $25,000 for serialization of the latter. When Cather traveled to London on McClure’s business in 1909, she carried a letter of introduction to him, but it is not clear whether she met him again there. Throughout her life Cather expressed enthusiasm for Kipling’s works, which she associated with a spirit of adventure, and her letters make clear that she followed his life and career closely.