"Superbly written, with that sensitivity to sunset and afterglow that has always been Miss Cather's."
—The New York Times
Willa Cather wrote Shadows on the Rock immediately after her historical masterpiece, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Like its predecessor, this novel of seventeenth-century Quebec is a luminous evocation of North American origins, and of the men and women who struggled to adapt to that new world even as they clung to the artifacts and manners of one they left behind.
In 1697, Quebec is an island of French civilization perched on a bare gray rock amid a wilderness of trackless forests. For many of its settlers, Quebec is a place of exile, so remote that an entire winter passes without a word from home. But to twelve-year-old Cécile Auclair, the rock is home, where even the formidable Governor Frontenac entertains children in his palace and beavers lie beside the lambs in a Christmas créche. As Cather follows this devout and resourceful child over the course of a year, she re-creates the continent as it must have appeared to its first European inhabitants. And she gives us a spellbinding work of historical fiction in which great events occur first as rumors and then as legends—and in which even the most intimate domestic scenes are suffused with a sense of wonder.
Willa Cather's lyrical and bittersweet novel of a middle-aged man losing control of his life is a brilliant study in emotional dislocation and renewal.
Professor Godfrey St. Peter is a man in his fifties who has devoted his life to his work, his wife, his garden, and his daughters, and achieved success with all of them. But when St. Peter is called on to move to a new, more comfortable house, something in him rebels. And although at first that rebellion consists of nothing more than mild resistance to his family's wishes, it imperceptibly comes to encompass the entire order of his life. The Professor's House combines a delightful grasp of the social and domestic rituals of a Midwestern university town in the 1920s with profound spiritual and psychological introspection.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Antonia Shimerdas moves to the harsh Nebraska heartland with her impoverished Bohemian family when she is still a girl. For young Jim Burden, who lives with his grandparents on a homestead nearby, Antonia is an embodiment of the female pioneer-self-sufficient, vigorous, and determined to withstand the daily challenges of maintaining home and family in a primitive countryside. When Jim grows up, his memories return to Antonia. In his effort to understand what she meant to him, he creates an enduring picture of the American frontier and of a woman of unusual spirit.
Orphaned at the age of 10, Jim Burden moves to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. There he meets Ántonia Shimerda, the daughter of an immigrant family from Bohemia, who have come to carve out a life for themselves in the harsh and bountiful Nebraskan landscape. At the urging of her father, Jim teaches Ántonia English and together they share adventures that will bind them throughout their lives, despite the vicissitudes of time and fate, and years of separation. The final book in Willa Cather's Great Plains trilogy, My Ántonia is a lyrical tribute to the bygone pioneer life and the struggles and successes of America's early settlers.
First published in 1926, this book is Willa Cather's sparest and most dramatic novel, a dark and prescient portrait of a marriage that subverts our oldest notions about the nature of domestic happiness.
As a young woman, Myra Henshawe gave up a fortune to marry for love--a boldly romantic gesture that became a legend in her family. But this worldly, sarcastic, and perhaps even wicked woman may have been made for something greater than love. In her portrait of Myra and in her exquisitely nuanced depiction of her marriage, Cather shows the evolution of a human spirit as it comes to bridle against the constraints of ordinary happiness and seek an otherwordly fulfillment. My Mortal Enemy is a work whose drama and intensely moral imagination make it unforgettable.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Willa Cather's best known novel is an epic--almost mythic--story of a single human life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert. In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows--gently, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Out of these events, Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
An incredible novel strength and resilience that celebrates the tremendous spirit of the immigrant pioneers in AmericaMy Ántonia chronicles the life of Ántonia, a Bohemian immigrant woman, as seen through the eyes of Jim, the man unable to forget her. Jim, now a successful New York lawyer, recollects his upbringing on a Nebraska farm. Even after twenty years, Ántonia continues to live a romantic life in his imagination. When he returns to Nebraska, he finds Ántonia has lived a battered life and is now abandoned by the very man to whom she dedicated her life. Jim wonders now if he will ever again see the vibrancy of life and incredible courage that he once knew in Ántonia.…This novel is part of Brilliance Audio's extensive Classic Collection, bringing you timeless masterpieces that you and your family are sure to love.
In this semiautobiographical portrait of a young artist in the making, Willa Cather takes us into the heart of a woman coming to know her deepest self. Thea Kronborg, a minister's daughter in a provincial Colorado town, has dreams and gifts that her humble hometown will not satisfy. With the support of a few allies who recognize her rare qualities, she follows her ambitions to the big city, determined to be an opera diva. As she moves through a series of music teachers in Chicago, Thea finds that the attitudes and standards of those around her rarely match her own. It is only when she reconnects with pure nature in a brilliant Arizona desert canyon that Thea rediscovers the sensuous, mystical openness that is the source of her art. Realizing she must protect this experience at all costs, she resolves to shed all relationships that don't serve her higher purpose.
"The Song of the Lark is one of several works in which Cather displays her lyrical powers."-Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature
Life on the divide was a struggle for the pioneering Bergson family. Alexandra, both tough as nails and tender as a budding blossom, faces and conquers the harsh realities of early settlers in Nebraska.
The struggle for life, love, and meaning permeate this timeless classic. Willa Cather captures the imagination with her vivid portrayals of the landscape and the enduring desire to achieve a dream.
After studying piano as a child, Thea Kronborg leaves her family and their frontier town of Moonstone, Colorado to pursue music in Chicago. There, her instructor insists that her singing voice is her greater gift, and she begins to work on mastering her craft. Seeking to become one of the worldÄôs greatest opera singers, she embarks on a journey of self-discovery and fulfillment that takes her across the world. Written in 1915 and featuring lyrical and authentic insights about life on the frontier, this book is the second in Willa CatherÄôs Prairie Trilogy, following O Pioneers! and preceding My ?Åntonia.
After the death of his parents, Jim Burden is sent to live with his grandparents on the Nebraska plains. By chance, on that same train is Ántonia, a bright-eyed girl who will become his neighbor and lifelong friend. Her family has emigrated from Bohemia to start a new life farming but soon lose their money and must work hard just to survive. Through it all, Ántonia retains her natural pride and free spirit.
Jim's grandparents have a large and tidy farm. They are kind to him, but conventional. Later, Jim becomes a scholar and Ántonia becomes a "hired girl" in town. She blossoms in the new freedom that town life offers. Jim can only taste this life vicariously through her recounting of town gossip and of the "dance tent." Ántonia's strong will, spirit, and honesty allow her to thrive in the midst of hardship.
In My Ántonia, Willa Cather paints a rich picture of life on the prairie at the beginning of the twentieth century and depicts some of the many cultures that came to compose the United States.
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