McClure, Samuel Sidney (1857-1949) (“S.S.”). Irish-born American publisher. McClure immigrated to the U.S. at age nine, living with his family in Indiana. Despite poverty and the limited education he had received in Ireland, he graduated from high school and then Knox College in Illinois. He then moved to Boston, MA, where from 1882 to 1884 he edited the Wheelman, a bicycling magazine. Despite opposition from her parents, he married his Knox College classmate Harriet Hurd in 1883. The couple had four biological children (Eleanor, Bess, Mary, and Robert), and adopted one (Enrico). In 1884, S.S. started McClure’s Syndicate, which placed fiction in newspapers across the country. In 1893 with his college classmate John Sanborn Phillips he started McClure's Magazine, which was best-known for the "muckraking" exposés by writers such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens, but which also published literature. After his cousin H.H. McClure, who worked for the McClure Syndicate, brought Cather to S.S. McClure’s attention, McClure, Phillips & Co. brought out Cather’s first book of fiction, The Troll Garden (1905). When most of the editorial staff, including Steffens and Tarbell, resigned from McClure’s in 1906, he hired Cather as an editor; she later became managing editor. After she left her position at McClure’s in 1912 and when S. S. McClure had lost control of the magazine still bearing his name, Cather ghost wrote his autobiography (McClure’s serial 1913-1914, book publication 1914). McClure made repeated—and ultimately failed—attempts to reestablish himself in journalism and magazine publishing, often trying to enlist Cather in these enterprises. She almost went with him to Europe in 1915 to report on the war for the Evening Mail, and she remained personally loyal to her mercurial and often-irresponsible former employer. He served as the prototype for Marcus O’Mally, editor of the Outcry, in her story “Ardessa” (1918), and it has been suggested that Cather modeled the courtship and marriage between Myra and Oswald Henshaw in My Mortal Enemy (1926) on that of the McClures.

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.