Office Bohemia

Edith Lewis moved to Greenwich Village in 1903 to pursue literary work and Bohemian life. Willa Cather visited her there twice before moving to the Village herself in 1906 to become an editor at McClure’s Magazine, the staff of which Lewis also joined. This chapter argues that Lewis’s editorial collaboration with Cather emerged out of their work at McClure’s. It also argues that when they moved in together in 1908, they followed the example of Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields, whom Cather had met while working for McClure’s in Boston. Cather left magazine work to take up full-time authorship, but Lewis continued working at McClure’s and then Every Week. Lewis gave up writing bylined fiction and poetry, but together she and Cather merged pragmatism and idealism, the market and aesthetics.