McClure's Magazine
Entry updated 20 August 2012. Tagged: Publication.
US Slick magazine published by S S McClure, edited by Ida Tarbell and others. Monthly June 1893 to January 1926 (irregularly towards the end). Recommenced June 1926 as a romance magazine. Merged with Smart Set in April 1929.
Samuel S McClure (1857-1949) made his money establishing the first US newspaper syndicate, and used this knowledge when he launched his monthly magazine to save costs by drawing some of his stories from those published in Britain, initially The Idler, but later The Windsor. McClure's was one of the first low-price American general-interest illustrated magazines and thus not only proved highly popular but also set standards. It became best known for its muckraking journalism, which rather overshadowed its fiction, but within the magazine were a number of important stories which received their first publication in McClure's. Perhaps its best remembered sf publication is Rudyard Kipling's With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 AD (November 1905; rev 1909 chap). Two interesting disaster stories were "Within an Ace of the End of the World" (April 1900) by Robert Barr and Simon Newcomb's no-holds-barred "The End of the World" (May 1903). Jack London's "The Unparalleled Invasion" (July 1910) is a Future-War and Yellow Peril story in which the author, famous as a believer in the Brotherhood of Man, recommends genocide of the Chinese. A serialized novel was Cleveland Moffett's "The Conquest of America in 1921" (May-August 1915; vt The Conquest of America: A Romance of Disaster and Victory: U.S.A. 1921 A.D. 1916). [JE/MA/PN]
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