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Viola Roseboro'
Roseboro' in her twenties
Born(1857-12-03)December 3, 1857
Pulaski, Tennessee, U.S.
DiedJanuary 29, 1945(1945-01-29) (aged 87)
Huguenot, Staten Island
Occupations
  • Actress
  • Journalist
  • Fiction editor
Organizations

Viola Roseboro'[a] (December 3, 1857[3][1] — January 29, 1945)[4] was an American literary editor. She was the fiction editor for McClure's and, later, for Collier's, in which role she discovered several important authors. Ida Tarbell called her a "born reader" and a "reader of real genius".[1]

Early life

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Roseboro' was born in Pulaski, Tennessee,[5] in 1857. Her parents, the Reverend Samuel Reed Roseboro'[b] and Martha Colyar,[7] were abolitionists, and the family was soon forced to flee to Mattoon, Illinois, where Roseboro' lived for the duration of the American Civil War.[8] Her uncle was Tennessee publisher and politician Arthur St. Clair Colyar.[3]

She graduated from the Fairmount School in Monteagle, Tennessee,[7] and, under the name Viola Roseborough,[1] briefly pursued a theatrical career with the Shook and Collier Company.[9] She moved to New York City in 1882 and continued performing; however, in 1887[10] she was forced to retire after she developed pneumonia.[1]

Literary career

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Roseboro' began her literary career with a weekly arts column in The Nashville Daily American.[1] By 1887, her writing was being published in The Century Magazine, The Cosmopolitan, and The Daily Graphic;[1] this brought her in contact with S. S. McClure, who hired her as a reader for the McClure Syndicate, and, subsequently, for McClure's Magazine.[11][1]

At McClure's, her subordinates included Sonya Levien, who she is credited with having "mentored", [12] Willa Cather (who Roseboro' may have hired,[13] or caused to be hired)[10] and Witter Bynner, whose first poems were published in McClure's with her approval; Bynner subsequently described his job as delivering manuscripts from the editorial office to Roseboro's apartment.[11]

When McClure lost control of the magazine in 1911, Roseboro' left her position there,[10] and by 1913 had joined the staff of Collier's.[14] After her position at Collier's ended, she became a freelance editorial consultant, and briefly worked again at McClure's after McClure regained control in 1921.[10]

Her discoveries included Jack London,[11][2] Booth Tarkington[13] (whose The Gentleman from Indiana she described as having been "sent by God Almighty"),[15] and William Sidney Porter, from whom she bought the first story under the pseudonym "O. Henry".[11]

Influence on Cather

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Roseboro' has been credited with having enabled the success of Willa Cather's novel My Ántonia by suggesting, after having read an earlier version of the manuscript, that Cather rewrite it with Jim Burden as the viewpoint character.[1][13]

Literary scholar Merrill Skaggs identified Roseboro' as Willa Cather's probable inspiration for Myra Henshawe, protagonist of Cather's 1926 novel My Mortal Enemy, and posited that although Cather said the inspiration for Henshawe had died in 1911, this was a reference to Roseboro' having left McClure's in that year.[3] Similarly, literary scholar Elizabeth Ammons has speculated that Roseboro's 1907 short story "The Mistaken Man" "provided the spark for" Cather's 1912 novel Alexander's Bridge.[16]

Writing

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Roseboro' continued writing her own fiction even after becoming an editor, including the novels The Joyous Heart (1903) and Storms of Youth (1920), and the short story collections Old Ways and New (1892) and Players and Vagabonds (1904).[7]

Notes

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  1. ^ Roseboro' "fiercely defended"[1] the "odd apostrophe at the end of her name".[2]
  2. ^ One source states that Viola Roseboro' added the apostrophe to her name as an adult, and that at other times in her life she had used the spellings "Roseborough" and "Rosborough";[3] other sources, however, indicate that her father used the apostrophe as well.[6]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i The Strange, Forgotten Life of Viola Roseboro', in The Paris Review; by Stephanie Gorton; published February 24, 2020; retrieved August 8, 2021
  2. ^ a b Author Under Sail: The Imagination of Jack London, 1893-1902, p. 186; by James J. Williams; published November 1, 2014, by University of Nebraska Press
  3. ^ a b c d Viola Roseboro': A Prototype for Cather's "My Mortal Enemy", by Merrill M. Skaggs, in Mississippi Quarterly; Winter 2000-2001, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 5-21
  4. ^ VIOLA ROSEBORO', FICTION EDITOR, 87: Former McClure's, Collier's Executive Dies--Helped O. Henry Get Start Bought Tarkington Stories Praised by Will Irwin, in The New York Times; published January 30, 1945; retrieved August 8, 2021
  5. ^ ROSEBORO, Viola, in Who's Who in America (1901-1902 edition); via archive.org
  6. ^ VIOLA: THE DUCHESS OF NEW DORP, by Jane Kirkland Graham; published 1955 by Illinois Printing Company
  7. ^ a b c Gertrude Hall Brownell Collection of Viola Roseboro' Correspondence at the Amherst College Archives and Special Collections; retrieved August 8, 2021. Click 'See more'.
  8. ^ BOOK REVIEWS: "Viola, the Duchess of New Dorp: A Biography of Viola Roseboro'", by S. A. Wetherbee, in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, volume 49, number 1 (Spring 1956)
  9. ^ Viola, the Duchess of New Dorp, a Biography of Viola Roseboro' by Jane Kirkland Graham, reviewed by Isabel Howell, in Tennessee Historical Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 4 (December 1956), pp. 368-370
  10. ^ a b c d Person Annotations: Viola Roseboro', at the Willa Cather Archives, University of Nebraska
  11. ^ a b c d "Chapter IV. The Making of a Magazine". McClure's Magazine and the Muckrakers. 2015. pp. 62–80. doi:10.1515/9781400872305-005. ISBN 978-1-4008-7230-5.
  12. ^ Rosenbloom, Nancy J. (2015). "From Greenwich Village to Hollywood: The Literary Apprenticeship of Sonya Levien". The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. 14 (1): 80–103. doi:10.1017/S1537781414000577. JSTOR 43903060.
  13. ^ a b c Viola Roseboro’s literary garden, by Stephen Schmalhofer, in The New Criterion; published December 12, 2018; retrieved August 8, 2021
  14. ^ Advertisement for Collier's in the Washington Evening Star; p. 10; published April 29, 1913; via Chronicling America; "NEW STORY EDITOR: Collier's has engaged Miss Viola Roseboro', whose ability to choose stories needs no mention to the story-loving public."
  15. ^ All In The Day's Work: An Autobiography, by Ida Tarbell, p. 198; published 1939 by Macmillan Publishers; via archive.org
  16. ^ The Engineer as Cultural Hero and Willa Cather's First Novel, Alexander's Bridge, by Elizabeth Ammons, in American Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 5 (Winter, 1986), pp. 746-760
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