316 Willa Cather (with Lauren Marino)

The History of Literature

Jacke Wilson

History, Books, Arts

4.6 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2021

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Willa Cather (1873-1947) went from a childhood in Nebraska to a career in publishing in New York City, where she became one of the most successful women in journalism. And then, after a period as an editor for one of the most famous magazines in America, she focused on writing novels about the hardscrabble lives of immigrants trying to tame the Midwestern prairie, including enduring classics like O Pioneers! and My Antonia. In this episode, Jacke is joined by Lauren Marino, author of Bookish Broads: Women Who Wrote Themselves Into History, to talk about the life and works of Willa Cather. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. (We appreciate it!) Find out more at historyofliterature.com, jackewilson.com, or by following Jacke and Mike on Twitter at @thejackewilson and @literatureSC. Or send an email to [email protected]. New!!! Looking for an easy to way to buy Jacke a coffee? Now you can at paypal.me/jackewilson. Your generosity is much appreciated! The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. *** This show is a part of the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. We encourage you to visit the website and sign up for our newsletter for more information about our shows, launches, and events. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you're listening to The History of Literature, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding literature, history, and storytelling like Storybound, Micheaux Mission, and The History of Standup. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglomerate Network and LitHub Radio.
0:13.0	Hello.
0:14.0	We're going to start today with a magazine called McClure's, an magazine publisher, Samuel Sidney McClure.
0:21.0	He was born in 1857 in Northern Ireland. His father died when he was eight, and his mother,
0:27.0	facing hard times, emigrated to America, where they wound up on a farm in Indiana, desperately poor.
0:34.0	Young Samuel worked hard, made his way through high school into Knox College,
0:39.0	where he co-founded a student newspaper.
0:42.0	That gave him the taste for the journalism business, and he headed off to New York City,
0:47.0	where fortunes were made.
0:49.0	He was an immigrant, and not well connected, but immigrants who grew up speaking English had at least
0:55.0	that much of an advantage.
0:57.0	Many had energy, too, and ideas, and a kind of frenzy to succeed.
1:03.0	He developed an idea for a syndicate, that you could sell one article to multiple smaller outlets,
1:10.0	newspapers and magazines, and the McClure syndicate established in 1884, when he was 27,
1:16.0	began that entire industry.
1:19.0	If you're like me, and you grew up with comic strips that ran in a few hundred newspapers,
1:24.0	and advice columns, and op-eds, and recipes, and Omar Sharif's chest notes, and all that stuff,
1:32.0	that pretty much started with McClure, and his idea, which he believed in as if it were a religion.
1:37.0	But he was also a restless man. He was probably what we would now view as manic depressive,
1:43.0	and he couldn't work with others very well, and he could not sit still.
1:47.0	In 1893, he founded McClure's magazine, which he thought of when talking to Rudyard Kipling,
1:54.0	and Kipling later said that he thought that McClure had thought of the idea, and spent the next 12 hours talking about it.
	...

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