File:McClure's Magazine v30n06 (1908-04) (IA McCluresMagazineV30n06190804).pdf

American magazines like Harper’s and Scribner’s, the magazine achieved distinction and national fame at the turn of the century by launching the “muckraking” era in American journalism. Bringing together a team of pioneering journalists that included Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker,

and Lincoln Steffens, the magazine published a series of deeply 

researched exposés of abuse and corruption in American government and big business, such as Tarbell’s landmark history of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company and Baker’s series on Andrew Carnegie’s U.S. Steel.

Over a five year period, the magazine’s investigative reporting 

launched major campaigns for reform and triggered a spate of new legislation, while the paper’s circulation reached over a half million readers. When this core group of investigative journalists left the magazine in 1906 to start their own (The American Magazine), S. S. McClure responded by hiring Willa Cather as editor and moving the magazine in a more literary direction. In addition to numerous contributions by Cather herself, the magazine published works by Arnold Bennett, Arthur Conan Doyle, O. Henry, A. E. Housman, Ford Madox Heuffer, Sarah Orne Jewett, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, R. L. Stevenson, Booth Tarkington,

Mrs. Humphrey Ward, and W. B. Yeats. Like other quality journals of the 

day, McClure’s was richly illustrated, publishing art work by N. C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Jessie Wilcox Smith, and Arthur G. Dove, and a typical issue easily averaged a hundred pages