Willa Cather, McClure’s , and the Influence of Illustration on “Coming, Aphrodite!”

ABSTRACT: Later in her life, Willa Cather frequently disparaged American magazine culture, but her time at McClure’s in the early twentieth century had a significant influence on her fiction. This essay seeks to understand the impact that Cather’s association with McClure’s —and its illustrators and art editors in particular—had on Cather during a formative time in her career, and how it manifested in some of her early work, especially, her short story “Coming, Aphrodite!” (1920). A closer look at the illustrators and artists Cather became acquainted with as an editor at Mc-Clure’s reveals her deep engagement with the contemporary art scene, from which she learned a great deal that she subsequently applied to her fiction.