Viola Roseboro'

Viola Roseboro' (December 3, 1857 was an American literary editor. She was the fiction editor for McClure's and later for Collier's, in which role she discovered several important authors. Ida Tarbell called her a "born reader" and a "reader of real genius". in 1857. Her parents, the Reverend Samuel Reed Roseboro' and Martha Colyar, were abolitionists, and the family was soon forced to flee to Mattoon, Illinois, where Roseboro' lived for the duration of the American Civil War. Her uncle was Tennessee publisher and politician Arthur St. Clair Colyar. She moved to New York City in 1882 and continued performing; however, in 1887 she was forced to retire after she developed pneumonia. Willa Cather (who Roseboro' may have hired, or caused to be hired)

When McClure lost control of the magazine in 1911, Roseboro' left her position there, After her position at Collier's ended, she became a freelance editorial consultant, and briefly worked again at McClure's after McClure regained control in 1921. and William Sidney Porter, from whom she bought the first story under the pseudonym "O. Henry". Her letters show that she and Roseboro' were friends for decades, with the earliest collected correspondence between the two being dated 1903 and the last being dated 1944. Roseboro' facilitated the 1905 publication of Cather's The Troll Garden,

Literary scholar Merrill Skaggs identified Roseboro' as Willa Cather's probable inspiration for Myra Henshawe, protagonist of Cather's 1926 novel My Mortal Enemy, and posited that although Cather said the inspiration for Henshawe had died in 1911, this was a reference to Roseboro' having left McClure's in that year.

Writing Roseboro' continued writing her own fiction even after becoming an editor, including the novels The Joyous Heart (1903) and Storms of Youth (1920), and the short story collections Old Ways and New (1892) and Players and Vagabonds (1904).