Alexander Kelly McClure

Alexander Kelly McClure 1828-1909, American journalist and political leader, b. Perry co., Pa. He edited and published the Juniata Sentinel of Mifflintown, Pa., before acquiring and editing (1850-56, 1862-64) the Franklin Repository at Chambersburg. He was an early and active Republican, and, at the party's national convention in 1860, he and Andrew G. Curtin swung the pivotal Pennsylvania delegation to Lincoln. As chairman of the state committee, McClure built up the Republican organization that secured the governorship for Curtin and Pennsylvania's electoral votes for Lincoln. He served in both houses of the state legislature and after the Civil War practiced law in Philadelphia. McClure supported Gen. U. S. Grant in 1868, but in 1872 was one of the leaders of the Liberal Republican party, which nominated Horace Greeley for President. In 1874 he was defeated for mayor of Philadelphia. He founded (1875) the Philadelphia Times and was its editor until 1901.

Bibliography: See his recollections (1902).

Cather, Willa (1873–1947), writer.Although associated with the midwestern landscape she celebrated in her fiction, Cather was born in a small farming community in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and emigrated to Nebraska with her family in 1883. She attended the University of Nebraska and went on to jobs in teaching and publishing, becoming managing editor of McClure's Magazine in 1908. Her ambition was to be a writer, however, and she found support for her creativity from women friends and lovers, notably Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909), author of The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896); Isabelle McClung; Edith Lewis; and Elizabeth Sergeant. S.S. McClure published her first book of short fiction, The Troll Garden, in 1905, and in 1911 Cather took a leave of absence from McClure's to write fiction. Her first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912), was heavily influenced by Henry James, but in O Pioneers! (1913) she returned to her familiar Nebraska prairies for inspiration. Finding increasing literary and economic success, Cather over the next three decades published fourteen novels or collections of stories, including My ántonia (1918), The Professor's House (1925), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).

Cather's early novels were hailed by such prominent critics as Henry Louis Mencken and Edmund Wilson. Her critical reputation soared throughout the 1920s, but in the 1930s, when left‐wing critics favored socially conscious fiction, she was attacked by Granville Hicks and others for “escapism.” But she never lost her wide readership, and by the 1990s she was reinstated as a major American novelist. Once viewed as a simple celebrator of the American past, she came to be recognized as an explorer of the darker tones of American life—change, loss, diminishment. Yet she also provided an unsentimental counterpoint to this underside of the American dream: the human desire to make meaning through creative work, family, religion, art, domestic crafts, and—most important to Willa Cather—through storytelling.
See also Literature: Civil War to World War I; Literature: Since World War I; Magazines; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Sharon O'Brien , Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, 1987; reprint 1997.
James Woodress , Willa Cather, 1987.
Hermione Lee , Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up, 1989.

Sharon O'Brien