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Find out moreWilla Cather (1873–1947) grew up in Nebraska. She was the author of the novels My Antonia, and The Song of the Lark.
May 2010 Good Housekeeping selection. On My Bookshelf by Nicci French... I read and re-read My Antonia by Willa Cather, and have passed it on to family and friends. It tells the story of poverty-stricken immigrant families living on the wild plains of Nebraska, and particularly of Antonia, a spirited and generous girl from Bohemia. Fabulous and good for the soul.
The second novel in Willa Cather's Great Plains Trilogy, that includes O Pioneers! and My Antonia. The Song of the Lark follows the exceptionally talented Thea Kronberg, a young woman from the small town of Moonstone, Colorado. Gifted with a beautiful voice, Thea's determination and work ethic mean she defies her humble beginnings and finds success far from her home town. But her achievements are not without their drawbacks: as the distance between Thea and her roots grows ever wider, she must fight to find an inner strength if she is to recognise her deepest ambitions and reach her full potential. This is a lyrical coming-of-age story charting the struggles of an artist's life. 'Lingers long in the memory' Joyce Carol Oates
The final novel in Willa Cather's acclaimed Great Plains Trilogy, that includes O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SARA WHEELER My Antonia tells the story of Jim Burden, a young orphan sent to live with relatives in the plains of Nebraska, and the life of his neighbour and friend, Antonia Shimerda. While Jim is a native Virginian, Antonia's family are recent immigrants from Bohemia, and they grow together as Jim tutors Antonia in English. While their childhoods are shared, however, their paths soon begin to diverge, spurred on by the effects of dire poverty on the Shimerda family. And while Jim enjoys academic success and a white-collar job, Antonia remains in the fields that raised them, dedicating herself to her land and domestic duties. Cather's novel was met with instant acclaim: in it she paints a portrait of the beautiful, unforgiving Nebraskan landscape and honours the lives of ordinary people during a pivotal era in American history. `One of the warmest, most quietly rousing books that I know; a clear-eyed salute to the resilience of the human spirit' Guardian
Two priests are despatched from Rome to New Mexico to reinvigorate Catholicism among the locals, knowing little of the challenges that await them. They face a journey characterised by drudgery, danger and a vast, unending, often barren landscape. Over almost four decades they encounter a rich variety of people, from rebellious Mexican priests to steadfast Native Americans uninterested in changing their longstanding customs. Ultimately the pair must grapple with the near impossibility of spreading their faith in an ancient land built on its own traditions. This is a work of simplicity and beauty, and a portrait of a steadfast friendship, from one of America's most celebrated novelists. `Quite simply a masterpiece' Daily Telegraph
The first novel in Willa Cather's acclaimed Great Plains Trilogy, followed by The Song of the Lark and My Antonia. At the turn of the twentieth century in the prairies of Nebraska, Alexandra Bergson, a determined, capable young woman, inherits the family farm when her father dies early, exhausted by his attempts to make his land fertile. In spite of her brothers' doubts, Alexandra's ambitious vision for their land comes to fruition, but the price of her success appears to be a quiet, small life without the companionship most people crave. Soon, though, the equilibrium of country life is threatened: Marie Shabata's unhappy marriage is thrown into stark relief by the return of Alexandra's brother Emil, and the Bergson family as a whole is forced to reckon with the unexpected return of Alexandra's childhood confidant, the urbane and cosmopolitan Carl Linstrum. O Pioneers! is at once a love letter to the Nebraskan landscape and the tale of a remarkable heroine, whose strength of character in the face of tragedy made this novel an instant classic. `She is undoubtedly one of the greatest American writers' Observer
The final novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is a celebration of the American midwest with Cather's strongest heroine at its heart Jim and Antonia meets as children in the wide open plains of Nebraska at the end of the nineteenth century. Jim leaves for college and a career in the east, while Antonia stays at home, dedicating herself to her farm and family. As the years roll by, Jim will come to view Antonia as the embodiment of the prairie itself - tough, spirited and enduring, despite the hardness and loneliness of pioneer life. Willa Cather's beautiful novel is a celebration of the Nebraskan prairie she loved she much, and a powerful depiction of a pivotal era in the making of America.
In Willa CatherAos The Burglar's ChristmasAu, a young drifter finds himself alone on Christmas Eve, penniless and starving. Though he has failed at everything in life, including crime, he decides to break into a home and rob it to raise money for food. When he is caught in the act by the lady of the house, they both come to a terrible realization. The burglarAos desperate act leads to a transformative act of holiday love and charity. First published in Home Monthly in 1896.
In Willa CatherAos The Burglar's ChristmasAu, a young drifter finds himself alone on Christmas Eve, penniless and starving. Though he has failed at everything in life, including crime, he decides to break into a home and rob it to raise money for food. When he is caught in the act by the lady of the house, they both come to a terrible realization. The burglarAos desperate act leads to a transformative act of holiday love and charity. First published in Home Monthly in 1896.
The novel follows young Thea Konborg's growth from provincial Midwesterner to acclaimed international opera singer. Her ability to resolve the tensions between her personal and professional lives and to communicate through her art makes her an unusual and thoroughly modern heroine.
The novel follows young Thea Konborg's growth from provincial Midwesterner to acclaimed international opera singer. Her ability to resolve the tensions between her personal and professional lives and to communicate through her art makes her an unusual and thoroughly modern heroine.
One of Ours is Willa Cather's 1923 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the making of an American soldier. Claude Wheeler, the sensitive but aspiring protagonist, has ready access to his family's fortune but refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his uncaring father and pious mother, and rejected by a wife whose only love is missionary work, Claude is an idealist without ideals to cling to. Only when his country enters the Great War does he find the meaning of his life.
Perhaps Willa Cather's most autobiographical work, The Song of the Lark charts the story of a young woman's awakening as an artist against the backdrop of the western landscape. Thea Kronborg, an aspiring singer, struggles to escape from the confines her small Colorado town to the world of possibility in the Metropolitan Opera House. In classic Cather style, The Song of the Lark is the beautiful, unforgettable story of American determination and its inextricable connection to the land.
The second novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is a passionate portrait of the artist as a young woman Thea Kronberg, a young girl from a small town in Colorado has a great gift - her beautiful singing voice. Her talent takes her to the great opera houses of Europe, and through ambition and hard work, she forges a life as an artist. But if she can never go home again, nor can she leave behind her past. At last, in a desert canyon in Arizona, Thea has a revelation that will allow her to attain a new state of spirituality and become a truly great artist. 'Willa Cather makes a world which is burningly alive, sometimes lovely, often tragic' Helen Dunmore 'The Song of the Lark illuminates all her work' A. S. Byatt 'Lingers long in the memory' Joyce Carol Oates
This ebook compiles Willa Cather's complete novels, including "e;My Antonia"e;, "e;Death Comes for the Archbishop"e;, "e;O Pioneers!"e; and "e;One of Ours"e;. This edition has been professionally formatted and contains several tables of contents. The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.
The first novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is an ode to the American Midwest and the immigrants who transformed it To the anger of her brothers, it is Alexandra who is entrusted to manage their family farm in the tough, hostile prairie of Hanover, Nebraska following the death of their father. As the years pass, Alexandra rises heroically to the challenge, finding strength in the savage beauty of the land even as loneliness and personal tragedies crowd in. A rapturous work of understated lyricism, Willa Cather's 1913 tale of a pioneer woman who tames the wild, hostile lands of the Nebraskan prairie is also the story of what it means to be American.
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'Quite simply a masterpiece ... I am completely bowled over by it; by the power of its writing, by the vividness of its scene painting and by the stories it tells' A. N. Wilson 'Where there is great love there are always miracles' Two French priests have been sent to New Mexico to reawaken the faith. There, they must contend with unforgiving landscapes, danger, rebellion and loneliness. But through their many years together they are sustained by faith, friendship and the awe-inspiring majesty that surrounds them. A work of great simplicity and sublime beauty, Willa Cather's acclaimed novel asks, what is a life well lived? Death Comes for the Archbishop is a masterpiece by the author of O Pioneers! and the great novelist of American frontier life. 'Its whole effect works slowly and mysteriously ... a major, and rare, artistic achievement' A. S. Byatt
Il libro racconta la storia di un artista di talento nato in una piccola citt del Colorado che scopre e sviluppa la sua voce cantante. La sua storia e raccontata sullo sfondo del nascente West americano in cui e nata in una citt lungo la linea ferroviaria, di Chicago in rapida crescita vicino al volgere del ventesimo secolo, e del pubblico per i cantanti delle sue abilit negli Stati Uniti. rispetto allEuropa. Thea Kronborg cresce, apprende se stessa, i suoi punti di forza e il suo talento, fino a raggiungere il successo.
Willa Cather's My Antonia is considered one of the most significant American novels of the twentieth century. Set during the great migration west to settle the plains of the North American continent, the narrative follows Antonia Shimerda, a pioneer who comes to Nebraska as a child and grows with the country, inspiring a childhood friend, Jim Burden, to write her life story. The novel is important both for its literary aesthetic and as a portrayal of important aspects of American social ideals and history, particularly the centrality of migration to American culture. The Broadview edition includes a rich selection of primary source materials: the revised introduction for the 1926 edition; Cather's Mesa Verde Wonderland is Easy to Reach Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle, Peter and her comments on the novel; contemporary reviews and photographs.
Karpathos publishes the greatest works of history's greatest authors and collects them to make it easy and affordable for readers to have them all at the push of a button. All of our collections include a linked table of contents.Willa Cather was an American author best known for her novels on frontier life in the Great Plains.The Prairie Trilogy includes the following:O Pioneers!The Song of the LarkMy ntonia
Chios Classics brings literature's greatest works back to life for new generations. All our books contain a linked table of contents.O Pioneers! is the first novel of the Great Plains trilogy written by Willa Cather.The book tells the story of a Swedish family living in a Nebraska farm town.
Chios Classics brings literature's greatest works back to life for new generations. All our books contain a linked table of contents.The Song of the Lark is the 2nd novel in the Great Plains trilogy written by Willa Cather.The action follows a talented artist from a small town in Colorado.
Youth and the Bright Medusa is a collection of short stories by Willa Cather, published in 1920. Several were published in an earlier collection, The Troll Garden.This collection contains the following stories:"e;Coming, Aphrodite!"e; a.k.a. "e;Coming, Eden Bower!"e;"e;The Diamond Mine"e;"e;A Gold Slipper"e;"e;Scandal"e;"e;Paul's Case"e;"e;A Wagner Matinee"e;"e;The Sculptor's Funeral"e;"e;A Death in the Desert"e;
The Troll Garden is a collection of short stories by Willa Cather, published in 1905.This collection contains the following seven stories:"e;Flavia and Her Artists"e;"e;The Sculptor's Funeral"e;"e;A Death in the Desert"e;"e;The Garden Lodge"e;"e;The Marriage of Phaedra"e;"e;A Wagner Matinee"e;"e;Paul's Case"e;
The Song of the Lark is the third novel by American author Willa Cather, written in 1915. It is generally considered to be the second novel in Cather's Prairie Trilogy, following O Pioneers! (1913) and preceding My Antonia (1918).The book tells the story of a talented artist born in a small town in Colorado who discovers and develops her singing voice. Her story is told against the backdrop of the burgeoning American West in which she was born in a town along the rail line, of fast-growing Chicago near the turn of the twentieth century, and of the audience for singers of her skills in the US compared to Europe. Thea Kronborg grows up, learning herself, her strengths and her talent, until she reaches success.The title comes from a painting of the same name by Jules Breton in 1884 and part of the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The first of her renowned prairie novels--a story that expresses Cather's conviction that "e;the history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman."e; When Alexandra Bergson takes over the family farm after her father's death, she falls under the spell of the rich, forbidding Nebraska prairie.
My Antonia (first published 1918) is considered the greatest novel by American writer Willa Cather. My Antonia - pronounced with the accent on the first syllable of "e;Antonia"e; - is the final book of the "e;prairie trilogy"e; of novels by Cather, a list that also includes O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark.My Antonia tells the stories of several immigrant families who move out to rural Nebraska to start new lives in America, with a particular focus on a Bohemian family, the Shimerdas, whose eldest daughter is named Antonia.
Alexander's Bridge is the first novel by American author Willa Cather. First published in 1912, it was re-released with an author's preface in 1922. It also ran as a serial in McClure's, giving Cather some free time from her work for that magazine.
This book-collection file includes Willa Cather's first five and best known novels: Alexander's Bridge, O Pioneers! The Song of the Lark, My Antonia, and One of Ours.It also includes the short story collection Youth and the Bright Medusa, and a Collection of Stories, Reviews, and Essays.According to Wikipedia: "e;Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873[1] - April 24, 1947) was an American author who grew up in Nebraska. She is best known for her depictions of frontier life on the Great Plains in novels such as O Pioneers!, My Antonia, and The Song of the Lark...Cather was celebrated by critics like H.L. Mencken for writing in plainspoken language about ordinary people. When novelist Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he paid homage to her by saying that Cather should have won the honor."e;
Three classic novels by Willa Cather.According to Wikipedia: "e;Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873[1] - April 24, 1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Antonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Nebraska and graduated from the University of Nebraska. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, then at age 33 she moved to New York where she lived for the rest of her life."e;
Die Geschichte einer talentierten Kunstlerin, die in einer kleinen Stadt in Colorado geboren wurde und ihre Singstimme entdeckt und weiterentwickelt. Ihre Geschichte erzhlt vor dem Hintergrund des aufkeimenden amerikanischen Westens, in dem sie in einer Stadt entlang der Eisenbahnstrecke geboren wurde, des schnell wachsenden Chicago um die Jahrhundertwende und des Publikums fur Snger ihrer Fhigkeiten in den USA im Vergleich zu Europa. Thea Kronborg wchst heran, lernt sich selbst, ihre Strken und ihr Talent, bis sie Erfolg hat.
Alexandras Vater stirbt, und es ist sein Wunsch, dass sie die Farm fuhrt, nachdem er weg ist. Alexandra und ihre Bruder Oscar und Lou besuchen spter Ivar, bekannt als Crazy Ivar wegen seiner unorthodoxen Ansichten. Zum Beispiel schlft er in einer Hngematte, glaubt daran, kein Lebewesen zu tten und geht im Sommer und Winter barfu.Aber er ist dafur bekannt, kranke Tiere zu heilen. Alexandra macht sich Sorgen um ihre Schweine, da die Schweine vieler ihrer Nachbarn sterben. Crazy Ivar rt ihr, ihre Schweine sauber zu halten, anstatt sie im Schmutz leben zu lassen und ihnen frisches, sauberes Wasser und gutes Essen zu geben. Dies besttigt Oscars und Lous Meinung, dass Ivar den Namen Crazy Ivar verdient. Alexandra beginnt jedoch Plne zu machen, wohin sie die Schweine umziehen wird.
The moving was over and done. Professor St. Peter was alone in the dismantled house where he had lived ever since his marriage, where he had worked out his career and brought up his two daughters. It was almost as ugly as it is possible for a house to be; square, three stories in height, painted the colour of ashes-the front porch just too narrow for comfort, with a slanting floor and sagging steps.As he walked slowly about the empty, echoing rooms on that bright September morning, the Professor regarded thoughtfully the needless inconveniences he had put up with for so long; the stairs that were too steep, the halls that were too cramped, the awkward oak mantles with thick round posts crowned by bumptious wooden balls, over greentiled fire-places.Certain wobbly stair treads, certain creaky boards in the upstairs hall, had made him wince many times a day for twenty-odd years-and they still creaked and wobbled. He had a deft hand with tools, he could easily have fixed them, but there were always so many things to fix, and there was not time enough to go round. He went into the kitchen, where he had carpentered under a succession of cooks, went up to the bathroom on the second floor, where there was only a painted tin tub; the taps were so old that no plumber could ever screw them tight enough to stop the drip, the window could only be coaxed up and down by wriggling, and the doors of the linen closet didn't fit. He had sympa-thized with his daughters' dissatisfaction, though he could never quite agree with them that the bath should be the most attractive room in the house.He had spent the happiest years of his youth in a house at Versailles where it distinctly was not, and he had known many charming people who had no bath at all. However, as his wife said: "e;If your country has contributed one thing, at least, to civilization, why not have it?"e; Many a night, after blowing out his study lamp, he had leaped into that tub, clad in his pyjamas, to give it another coat of some one of the many paints that were advertised to behave like porcelain, and didn't.
This ebook compiles Willa Cather's greatest writings, including novels and short stories such as "e;My Antonia"e;, "e;One of Ours"e;, "e;Paul's Case"e;, "e;O Pioneers!"e;, "e;A Wagner Matinee"e; and "e;Death Comes for the Archbishop"e;. This edition has been professionally formatted and contains several tables of contents. The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.
"e;My Antonia"e; evokes the Nebraska prairie life of Willa Cather's childhood, and commemorates the spirit and courage of immigrant pioneers in America. One of Cather's earliest novels, written in 1918, it is the story of Antonia Shimerda, who arrives on the Nebraska frontier as part of a family of Bohemian emigrants. Her story is told through the eyes of Jim Burden, a neighbor who will befriend Antonia, teach her English, and follow the remarkable story of her life. Working in the fields of waving grass and tall corn that dot the Great Plains, ntonia forges the durable spirit that will carry her through the challenges she faces when she moves to the city. But only when she returns to the prairie does she recover her strength and regain a sense of purpose in life. In the quiet, probing depth of Willa Cather's art, ntonia's story becomes a mobbing elegy to those whose persistence and strength helped build the American frontier. Willa Cather was a great artist. -Truman CapoteNo romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as "e;My ntonia"e;. -H. L. MenckenThe time will come when Willa Cather will be ranked above Hemingway. -Leon Edel
"e;My Antonia"e; evokes the Nebraska prairie life of Willa Cather's childhood, and commemorates the spirit and courage of immigrant pioneers in America. One of Cather's earliest novels, written in 1918, it is the story of Antonia Shimerda, who arrives on the Nebraska frontier as part of a family of Bohemian emigrants. Her story is told through the eyes of Jim Burden, a neighbor who will befriend Antonia, teach her English, and follow the remarkable story of her life. Working in the fields of waving grass and tall corn that dot the Great Plains, ntonia forges the durable spirit that will carry her through the challenges she faces when she moves to the city. But only when she returns to the prairie does she recover her strength and regain a sense of purpose in life. In the quiet, probing depth of Willa Cather's art, ntonia's story becomes a mobbing elegy to those whose persistence and strength helped build the American frontier. Willa Cather was a great artist. -Truman CapoteNo romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as "e;My ntonia"e;. -H. L. MenckenThe time will come when Willa Cather will be ranked above Hemingway. -Leon Edel
O Pioneers! is a novel by American author Willa Cather. O Pioneers! tells the story of the Bergsons, a family of Swedish immigrants in the farm country near the fictional town of Hanover, Nebraska, at the turn of the 20th century. The main character, Alexandra Bergson, inherits the family farmland when her father dies, and she devotes her life to making the farm a viable enterprise at a time when other immigrant families are giving up and leaving the prairie. The novel is also concerned with two romantic relationships, one between Alexandra and family friend Carl Linstrum and another between Alexandra's brother Emil and the married Marie Shabata. The romance between Emil and Marie and their death alludes to the similarly tragic lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, from Ovid's book Metamorphoses. Clear evidence of this occurs on page 173 where "e;the white mulberries...were covered with a dark stain"e;, directly corresponding to Ovid: nam color in pomo est.
These seven stories by Willa Cather, edited by Patricia T.O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman for Rushwater Press, arepublished here under the title Tales of Town & Country. Allbut one first appeared in periodicals.';A Death in the Desert' originally appeared in Scribner'sMagazine, January 1903.';The Bohemian Girl' was first published McClure's Magazine,August 1912.';A Gold Slipper' originally appeared in Harper's MonthlyMagazine, January 1917.';On the Divide' was first printed in Overland Monthly,January 1896.';Flavia and Her Artists' originally appeared in a collectionof Cather's stories, The Troll Garden, published inMarch 1905 by McClure, Phillips & Co.';The Bookkeeper's Wife' first appeared in The Centuryllustrated Monthly Magazine, May 1916.';Her Boss' was first published in October 1919 in boththe American and the British editions of the magazineSmart Set. The version included here is from the Americanedition.
The Song of the Lark is the third novel by American author Willa Cather, written in 1915. It is generally considered to be the second novel in Cather's Prairie Trilogy, following O Pioneers! (1913) and preceding My Antonia (1918). The book tells the story of a talented artist born in a small town in Colorado who discovers and develops her singing voice. Her story is told against the backdrop of the burgeoning American West in which she was born in a town along the rail line, of fast-growing Chicago near the turn of the twentieth century, and of the audience for singers of her skills in the US compared to Europe. Thea Kronborg grows up, learning herself, her strengths and her talent, until she reaches success. The title comes from a painting of the same name by Jules Breton in 1884 and part of the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Set in the 1890s in Moonstone, a fictional town in Colorado, The Song of the Lark is the self-portrait of an artist in the making. The ambitious young heroine, Thea Kronborg leaves her hometown to go to Chicago to fulfill her dream of becoming a well-trained pianist, a better piano teacher. When her instructor hears her voice, he realizes that this is her true artistic gift. He encourages her to pursue her vocal training instead of piano saying ... "e;your voice is worth all that you can put into it. I have not come to this decision rashly."e; [Part II; Chapter 7] In that pursuit she travels to Dresden, then to New York City, singing operas. Her reference for life is always her home town and the people she encountered there. The novel captures Thea's independent-mindedness, her strong work ethic, and her ascent to her highest achievement. At each step along the way, her realization of the mediocrity of her peers propels her to greater levels of accomplishment, but in the course of her ascent she must discard those relationships which no longer serve her.
Willa Sibert Cather (*1873 - 1947)Pulitzer Prize-winning American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, works such as O Pioneers!, My ntonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer for One of Ours [1922], a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Nebraska and graduated from the state university; she lived in New York for most of her adult life and writing career.
After the death of his parents, Jim was sent to live with his grandparents in Black Hawk Nebraska. There he befriended Antonia, the daughter of Bohemian immigrants. Years later, Jim, now a successful lawyer in New York, returns to his childhood home and Antonia. Jim's love for Antonia has endured, much as she herself has endured tragic circumstances.
After the death of his parents, Jim was sent to live with his grandparents in Black Hawk Nebraska. There he befriended Antonia, the daughter of Bohemian immigrants. Years later, Jim, now a successful lawyer in New York, returns to his childhood home and Antonia. Jim's love for Antonia has endured, much as she herself has endured tragic circumstances.
Alexandra Bergsons, the daughter of Swedish immigrants, inherits her family's ailing farm in Hanover, Nebraska upon the death of her father. Over the years, she turns the farm into a successful enterprise. However, success has not brought peace, as passion and love intervene.
Alexandra Bergsons, the daughter of Swedish immigrants, inherits her family's ailing farm in Hanover, Nebraska upon the death of her father. Over the years, she turns the farm into a successful enterprise. However, success has not brought peace, as passion and love intervene.
Alexandra Bergsons, the daughter of Swedish immigrants, inherits her family's ailing farm in Hanover, Nebraska upon the death of her father. Over the years, she turns the farm into a successful enterprise. However, success has not brought peace, as passion and love intervene.
In this haunting 1935 novel, the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of My ntonia performs crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction: the impermanence of innocence, the opposition between prairie and city, provincial American values and world culture, and the grandeur, elation, and heartache that await a gifted young woman who leaves her small Nebraska town to pursue a life in art.At the age of eighteen, Lucy Gayheart heads for Chicago to study music. She is beautiful and impressionable and ardent, and these qualities attract the attention of Clement Sebastian, an aging but charismatic singer who exercises all the tragic, sinister fascination of a man who has renounced life only to turn back to seize it one last time. Out of their doomed love affairand Lucy's fatal estrangement from her originsWilla Cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a Schubert sonata.From the Trade Paperback edition.
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 Sibert Cather (1873- 1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Antonia (1918). Through the 1910s and 1920s, Cather was firmly established as a major American writer. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I.This volume collects 50 of her classic short works, published between 1892 and 1920. Here are:LOU, THE PROPHETPETERA TALE OF THE WHITE PYRAMIDA SON OF THE CELESTIALTHE ELOPEMENT OF ALLEN POOLETHE CLEMENCY OF THE COURT"e;THE FEAR THAT WALKS BY NOONDAY"e;ON THE DIVIDEA NIGHT AT GREENWAY COURTTHE PRINCESS BALADINA -- HER ADVENTURETOMMY, THE UNSENTIMENTALTHE COUNT OF CROW'S NESTWEE WINKIE'S WANDERINGSTHE BURGLAR'S CHRISTMASTHE STRATEGY OF THE WEREWOLF DOGA RESURRECTIONTHE PRODIGIESNANETTE: AN ASIDETHE WAY OF THE WORLDTHE WEST BOUND TRAINERIC HERMANNSON'S SOULTHE DANCE AT CHEVALIER'STHE SENTIMENTALITY OF WILLIAM TAVENERA SINGER'S ROMANCETHE CONVERSION OF SUM LOOJACK-A-BOYEL DORADO: A KANSAS RECESSIONALTHE PROFESSOR'S COMMENCEMENTTHE TREASURE OF FAR ISLANDA DEATH IN THE DESERTA WAGNER MATINEETHE SCULPTOR'S FUNERALPAUL'S CASETHE NAMESAKETHE PROFILETHE WILLING MUSEELEANOR'S HOUSEON THE GULLS' ROADTHE ENCHANTED BLUFFTHE JOY OF NELLY DEANEBEHIND THE SINGER TOWERTHE BOHEMIAN GIRLCONSEQUENCESTHE BOOKKEEPER'S WIFETHE DIAMOND MINEA GOLD SLIPPERARDESSASCANDALHER BOSSCOMING, EDEN BOWER!If you enjoy this ebook, don't forget to search your favorite ebook store for "e;Wildside Press Megapack"e; to see more of the 300+ volumes in this series, covering adventure, historical fiction, mysteries, westerns, ghost stories, science fiction -- and much, much more!
A Lost Lady is the portrait of a frontier woman who reflects the conventions of her age even as she defies them.To the people of Sweet Water, a fading railroad town on the Western plains, Mrs. Forrester is the resident aristocrat, at once gracious and comfortably remote. To her aging husband she is a treasure whose value increases as his powers fail. To Niel Herbert, who falls in love with her as a boy and becomes her confidant as a man, Mrs. Forrester is by turns steadfast and faithless, dazzling and pathetic: a woman whose charm is intertwined with a terrifying vulnerability.From the Trade Paperback edition.
"e;Superbly written, with that sensitivity to sunset and afterglow that has always been Miss Cather's."e;The New York TimesWilla 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 onethey 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 Cecile 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 creche. 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 andthen as legendsand in which even the most intimate domestic scenes are suffused with a sense of wonder.
WillaCather's lyrical andbittersweet novel of a middle-aged man losing control of his lifeis 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.
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 withan 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.
Sapphira Dodderidge, a Virginia lady of the 19th century, marries beneath her and becomes irrationally jealous of Nancy, a beautiful slave. One of Cather's later works.
The finest family in Sweet Water, the Forresters are known for their gatherings, and Mrs. Forrester, to be an enchanting hostess. Niel Herbert finds himself at the Forester estate playing with friends, and he falls in love with Mrs. Forrester, and what she represents. As he grows up, he finds it increasingly harder to keep his boyhood image of her, and she does nothing to help.
Here, you will say, is an authentic masterpiece - a novel to rank with the finest of this or any age. All the magic of Miss Cather's subtle and flexible style, all the passion of her daring, impatient mind, are lavished upon the presentation of a single figure - sort of young Hamlet of the prairies. And upon the haunting story of his struggle with life and fate. One of Ours is the intimate story of a young man's life. Claude Wheeler's stormy youth, his enigmatic marriage, and the final adventure which releases the baffled energy of the boy's nature, are told with almost epic simplicity. But behind the personal drama there is an ever deepening sense of national drama, of national character, working itself our through individuals and their destiny.
Packaged in handsome, affordable trade editions, Clydesdale Classics is a new series of essential literary works. It features literary phenomena with influence and themes so great that, after their publication, they changed literature forever. From the musings of literary geniuses like Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the striking personal narrative of Solomon Northup in Twelve Years a Slave, this new series is a comprehensive collection of our history through the words of the exceptional few. My Antonia, a novel by Willa Cather, tells the story of friendship between Antonia Shimerda--a young woman who moves to the Midwestern prairie with her bohemian family--and Jim Burden, an orphaned child who moves from Virginia to the Midwest to be with his grandparents. The narrative is majorly told from the perspective of Burden, almost peripherally, as a memoir of his childhood in Nebraska. It is here where he meets Antonia and her family, his new neighbors. Eager to learn, Jim teaches Antonia English and they become fast friends. When Antonia's father tragically commits suicide, Antonia discontinues her lessons with Jim and begins to work on the farm where she and Jim share countless memorable experiences together. After being accepted into Lincoln University, Jim moves away. Meanwhile, Antonia copes with being abandoned by her fiancee and bearing an illegitimate child. When Jim graduates he returns to Nebraska and visits her before he starts law school, promising her that he'd visit again very soon. Despite keeping in touch, it is not until twenty years after this meeting that they meet again. Although in very different places in their lives, they pick up where they left off--the bond they formed as children remaining completely intact. A classic story by renowned American author Willa Cather, My Antonia is a timeless tale of a lifelong friendship.
'She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun...' A rapturous work of savage beauty, Willa Cather's 1913 tale of a pioneer woman who tames the wild, hostile lands of the Nebraskan prairie is also the story of what it means to be American. A new series of twenty distinctive, unforgettable Penguin Classics in a beautiful new design and pocket-sized format, with coloured jackets echoing Penguin's original covers.
An American Farm Boy In Search Of Meaning"e;Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together."e; - Willa Cather, One of OursClaude tries to escapes from his family firm grasp who want him pious and working at their family farm in Nebraska. He marries in his attempt to escape only to realize that his wife is not interested at all in him. That's when another opportunity arises: going overseas and fight for the American army in World War One. This Xist Classics edition has been professionally formatted for e-readers with a linked table of contents. This eBook also contains a bonus book club leadership guide and discussion questions. We hope you'll share this book with your friends, neighbors and colleagues and can't wait to hear what you have to say about it. Xist Publishing is a digital-first publisher. Xist Publishing creates books for the touchscreen generation and is dedicated to helping everyone develop a lifetime love of reading, no matter what form it takes
When Jim Burden writes a memoir of his childhood in Black Hawk, Nebraska, his story keeps returning to Antonia-the Bohemian immigrant girl who became his closest friend. Together, Jim and Antonia endured heartbreaks and hardships on the Nebraska frontier, developing a deep bond that lasted across the years. Looking back, Jim tries to sort reality from nostalgia and come to terms with his feelings for Antonia-realizing what she truly meant to him. Taken from the 1918 edition with illustrations by W. T. Benda, this is an unabridged version of American author Willa Cather's historical tale that explores the experience of growing up as a pioneer.
When Jim Burden writes a memoir of his childhood in Black Hawk, Nebraska, his story keeps returning to Antonia-the Bohemian immigrant girl who became his closest friend. Together, Jim and Antonia endured heartbreaks and hardships on the Nebraska frontier, developing a deep bond that lasted across the years. Looking back, Jim tries to sort reality from nostalgia and come to terms with his feelings for Antonia-realizing what she truly meant to him. Taken from the 1918 edition with illustrations by W. T. Benda, this is an unabridged version of American author Willa Cather's historical tale that explores the experience of growing up as a pioneer.
Willa Cather's 1935 novel drew on her lifelong interest in music, which plays a transformative role in the lives of her characters. Cather's last novel set in the Great Plains tells the story of young Lucy Gayheart, who escapes life in small-town Haverford, Nebraska, in 1902 to pursue a career in music. In Chicago she falls in love with an older singer, Clement Sebastian, who finds renewed inspiration in her. However, tragic chance destroys their ensuing love affair. The novel has evoked divergent responses among critics and readers ever since its publication. This Willa Cather Scholarly Edition includes a historical essay providing fresh insight into the novel, the role of music, and Cather's writing process. It also features photographs, maps, and explanatory notes with a full range of biographical, historical, and cultural information. The textual editing of the novel, approved by the Committee on Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association, draws on corrected typescripts and proofs and presents a clean, authoritative text of the first edition.
Though best known as an expert chronicler of the American West, Willa Cather's first novel is an in-depth character study of world-renowned bridge designer Bartley Alexander, whose seemingly settled life is thrown into turmoil when he takes up with a former lover during a stay in London. This thought-provoking tale is sure to be a pleasant surprise for fans of Cather's later novels.
An Ode to a Vanished Way of Life on the Nebraska Plains "e;I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister--anything a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me."e; Willa Cather, My Antonia In Willa Cather's My Antonia, thoughts of home and homesickness play a central role in this icon tale of the great plains of Nebraska. In this book, Jim Burden reflects on his childhood on the Nebraska prairie and the unforgettable girl, My Antonia. This Xist Classics edition has been professionally formatted for e-readers with a linked table of contents. This eBook also contains a bonus book club leadership guide and discussion questions. We hope you'll share this book with your friends, neighbors and colleagues and can't wait to hear what you have to say about it.
A Young Woman's Awakening as an Artist "e;Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is."e; Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark is a semi-autobiographical story of a girl from a rural town in eastern Colorado who attracts the attention of a series of mentors and sponsors for her musical talent.
A man torn between wife and mistress "e;No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person."e; Willa Cather, Alexander's Bridge In Alexander's Bridge by Willa Cather, Bartley Alexander is torn between his American wife and his British mistress. When the bridge he is building begins to collapse, disaster strikes both for his personal and professional future. This book also includes the short story, "e;The Barrel Organ"e; by Alfred Noyes. This Xist Classics edition has been professionally formatted for e-readers with a linked table of contents. This eBook also contains a bonus book club leadership guide and discussion questions. We hope you'll share this book with your friends, neighbors and colleagues and can't wait to hear what you have to say about it.
This is Cather's coming-of-age classic---the story of a young artist who leaves the mediocrity of her home town to seek fame and success in the big city. A bittersweet reflection on severing oneself from ones past relationships and surroundings, The Song of the Lark explores the loss that ultimately accompanies an artists highest achievements.
A Vintage Shorts ';Short Story Month' Selection Don Hedger had lived for four years on the top floor of an old house on the south side of Washington Square, New York, and nobody had ever disturbed him. But early one May, the vivacious singer Eden Brower moves in. ';Coming, Aphrodite!' is a Willa Cather masterpiece, possessing all the qualities that bubble just beneath the surface of Cather's work, deceptively tranquil on top but as exciting, ambitious, and boisterous as the American continent she so well represented below. Including Coney Island ballooning scenes, ancient Aztec tales, melancholy artists and prairie girls navigating the big city, Cather weaves an astonishing narrative of lost love and dashed opportunities. From the Collected Stories, spanning the length of her triumphant career. An eBook short.
An incredible novel strength and resilience that celebrates the tremendous spirit of the immigrant pioneers in AmericaMy ntonia chronicles the life of ntonia, 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, ntonia continues to live a romantic life in his imagination. When he returns to Nebraska, he finds ntonia 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 ntonia.This novel is part of Brilliance Audio's extensive Classic Collection, bringing you timeless masterpieces that you and your family are sure to love.
Though she later climbed to literary fame on the strength of her novels set in the American frontier such as O Pioneers! and My Antonia, much of Willa Cather's early fiction was set in the upper-crust enclaves of New York and New England. This collection of short stories deftly explores the inner workings of American high society in the early twentieth century, with a few forays into the vast Western plains that served as the backdrop for her later work.
Though she later climbed to literary fame on the strength of her novels set in the American frontier such as O Pioneers! and My Antonia, much of Willa Cather's early fiction was set in the upper-crust enclaves of New York and New England. This collection of short stories deftly explores the inner workings of American high society in the early twentieth century, with a few forays into the vast Western plains that served as the backdrop for her later work.
Virginia-born writer Willa Cather burst onto the American literary scene with this riveting collection of short stories, all loosely yoked together via the theme of the arts, artists, and creativity. Fans of Cather's later work will be surprised at the sophistication of these assured, mannered early pieces, which hint strongly of her admiration for the fiction of Henry James.
Virginia-born writer Willa Cather burst onto the American literary scene with this riveting collection of short stories, all loosely yoked together via the theme of the arts, artists, and creativity. Fans of Cather's later work will be surprised at the sophistication of these assured, mannered early pieces, which hint strongly of her admiration for the fiction of Henry James.
On the surface, Claude Wheeler appears to have a charmed life. The beloved child of a successful farmer and his wife, Claude attends an exclusive college and marries a childhood friend, but nevertheless struggles to find his purpose for living. It is only after he departs for the battlefields of Europe, that Claude is able to find what had eluded him for so long.Willa Cathers One of Ours won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.
A Beautiful Story of Love and Resilience "e;I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too full of life and love. They can't help it. People come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter."e; Willa Cather, O Pioneers! O Pioneers by Willa Cather is story of a family of Swedish immigrants who settle in a fictional town in Nebraska. When her father dies, Alexandra Bergson inherits the family farm and is determined to see it succeed, even at a time when many immigrant families are leaving the prairie. This Xist Classics edition has been professionally formatted for e-readers with a linked table of contents. This eBook also contains a bonus book club leadership guide and discussion questions. We hope you'll share this book with your friends, neighbors and colleagues and can't wait to hear what you have to say about it.Xist Publishing is a digital-first publisher. Xist Publishing creates books for the touchscreen generation and is dedicated to helping everyone develop a lifetime love of reading, no matter what form it takes
El caso de Paul fue publicado por primera vez en 1905 dentro del primer libro de cuentos de Willa Cather, El jardin de los Troll, que lanzo su carrera. El relato, considerado uno de los mejores de la literatura norteamericana de todos los tiempos, explora las contradicciones de muchos jovenes con vocacion artistica que viven en un mundo materialista. Cather se baso en un hecho real que ella vivio cuando ensenaba en Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: retrata a un joven que vivia para la belleza y pensaba que el dinero podria salvarle del tedio cotidiano. Paul es visto por su profesora como un bicho raro. Para l, tanto la escuela como su casa son aburridas y deprimentes. La verdadera vida se encuentra en el teatro en el que trabaja. Huir a Nueva York queriendo disfrutar al mximo, alejndose de la monotona del da a da
Driven by talent and ambition, Thea Kronborg leaves behind everyone and everything to fulfill her dreams of becoming an opera singer. Yet even as she achieves ever greater heights of success, Theas ambition drives her still furtherto her eventual debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, where she finally makes peace with what, and who, she has sacrificed for her career.The Song of the Lark is the second novel in Willa Cathers Great Plains trilogy, which also includes O Pioneers! and My Antonia. Originally published in 1915, The Song of the Lark was adapted for the screen by PBS in 2001.HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.
Jean Marie Latour is a bishop who has been tasked with establishing the Roman Catholic church in New Mexico, which has just officially become a part of the United States. After a treacherous year-long journey to reach New Mexico, Latour finds some of the Mexican religious leaders less than welcoming. Intent on his goal, Latour works for the remainder of his life to build a solid religious foundation in the fledgling territory.Willa Cather was inspired to write Death Comes for the Archbishop by the life of Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy who established the Saint Francis Cathedral in New Mexico between 1869 and 1886.HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.
This is the second novel in Cather's acclaimed Prairie Trilogy. Ambitious young musician Thea Kronborg courageously leaves behind everything she knows in order to give her artistic career a shot in the big city. Along the way, her talents evolve, and she learns that there is often a steep price to pay for artistic excellence.
This is the second novel in Cather's acclaimed Prairie Trilogy. Ambitious young musician Thea Kronborg courageously leaves behind everything she knows in order to give her artistic career a shot in the big city. Along the way, her talents evolve, and she learns that there is often a steep price to pay for artistic excellence.
Willa Sibert Cather was born on 7th December, 1873 and although born in Virginia grew up and was educated in Nebraska, the eldest of seven children. Although she moved to Pittsburgh for a job on a woman's journal and later to New York City for an editorial post, her successful novels were about frontier life and informed by her experience in Nebraska. The western state's harsh weather and dramatic landscape coupled with the multi cultural immigrant communities and Native American families forging their lives amid such hardships provided a hugely rich seam that she skilfully and movingly expressed in her work. She was critically acclaimed for these books and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1922. Willa was a very private person and whilst she often dressed as a man, nicknamed herself as William and had significant relationships with women, most notably with the editor Edith Lewis who she lived the last 39 years of her life, her sexual identity is not really clear. Willa Cather died 24th April, 1947 having received the Gold Award for Fiction, a prestigious prize awarded once a decade by the National Institute of Arts and Letters for an author's body of work. She was aged 73 and buried on a hillside in New Hampshire where her tombstone reads: The truth and charity of her great spirit will live on in the work which is her enduring gift to her country and all its people.
Willa Sibert Cather was born on 7th December, 1873 and although born in Virginia grew up and was educated in Nebraska, the eldest of seven children. Although she moved to Pittsburgh for a job on a woman's journal and later to New York City for an editorial post, her successful novels were about frontier life and informed by her experience in Nebraska. The western state's harsh weather and dramatic landscape coupled with the multi cultural immigrant communities and Native American families forging their lives amid such hardships provided a hugely rich seam that she skilfully and movingly expressed in her work. She was critically acclaimed for these books and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1922. Willa was a very private person and whilst she often dressed as a man, nicknamed herself as William and had significant relationships with women, most notably with the editor Edith Lewis who she lived the last 39 years of her life, her sexual identity is not really clear. Willa Cather died 24th April, 1947 having received the Gold Award for Fiction, a prestigious prize awarded once a decade by the National Institute of Arts and Letters for an author's body of work. She was aged 73 and buried on a hillside in New Hampshire where her tombstone reads: The truth and charity of her great spirit will live on in the work which is her enduring gift to her country and all its people.
Willa Sibert Cather was born on 7th December, 1873 and although born in Virginia grew up and was educated in Nebraska, the eldest of seven children. Although she moved to Pittsburgh for a job on a woman's journal and later to New York City for an editorial post, her successful novels were about frontier life and informed by her experience in Nebraska. The western state's harsh weather and dramatic landscape coupled with the multi cultural immigrant communities and Native American families forging their lives amid such hardships provided a hugely rich seam that she skilfully and movingly expressed in her work. She was critically acclaimed for these books and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1922. Willa was a very private person and whilst she often dressed as a man, nicknamed herself as William and had significant relationships with women, most notably with the editor Edith Lewis who she lived the last 39 years of her life, her sexual identity is not really clear. Willa Cather died 24th April, 1947 having received the Gold Award for Fiction, a prestigious prize awarded once a decade by the National Institute of Arts and Letters for an author's body of work. She was aged 73 and buried on a hillside in New Hampshire where her tombstone reads: The truth and charity of her great spirit will live on in the work which is her enduring gift to her country and all its people.
Willa Sibert Cather was born on 7th December, 1873 and although born in Virginia grew up and was educated in Nebraska, the eldest of seven children. Although she moved to Pittsburgh for a job on a woman's journal and later to New York City for an editorial post, her successful novels were about frontier life and informed by her experience in Nebraska. The western state's harsh weather and dramatic landscape coupled with the multi cultural immigrant communities and Native American families forging their lives amid such hardships provided a hugely rich seam that she skilfully and movingly expressed in her work. She was critically acclaimed for these books and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1922. Willa was a very private person and whilst she often dressed as a man, nicknamed herself as William and had significant relationships with women, most notably with the editor Edith Lewis who she lived the last 39 years of her life, her sexual identity is not really clear. Willa Cather died 24th April, 1947 having received the Gold Award for Fiction, a prestigious prize awarded once a decade by the National Institute of Arts and Letters for an author's body of work. She was aged 73 and buried on a hillside in New Hampshire where her tombstone reads: The truth and charity of her great spirit will live on in the work which is her enduring gift to her country and all its people.
This volume contains four great works (O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, My Antonia, and One of Ours) by the author who created the first autonomous and successful women's heroes in American literature. Willa Cather is one of America's most treasured writers. Her childhood in the woodlands of Virginia and on the prairies of Nebraska formed the inspiration for many of her novels, and her devotion to education provided the basis for her lifetime of achievement. Many critics have stated that Cather might have won a Nobel Prize had she not been a woman in a time of gender inequality. The time will come when she'll be ranked above Hemingway. --Leon Edel The thing about Willa Cather's landscape and figures is that not only were they born alive but remain so after six decades. --Guardian The Song of the Lark (1915): A story of something better than suggestiveness and charm--a thing finished, sound, and noble. --The Nation My Antonia (1918): No romantic novel ever written in America ...is half so beautiful as My Antonia. --H. L. Mencken Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction--novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
When Swedish immigrant Alexandra Bergson inherits her familys Nebraska farm upon her fathers death, she struggles to save her livelihood. The stalwart Alexandra refuses to give up, even as many other families abandon their dreams of a life on the prairies. While working to make the farm profitable, Alexandra must also contend with her feelings for Carl Linstrum, and deal with her brother Emil, who is involved in a risky affair with a married woman.The first novel in Willa Cathers seminal Great Plains trilogy, O Pioneers! was published in 1913. It has since been adapted into an opera and the 1992 Hallmark Hall of Fame television movie starring Jessica Lange, David Strathairn, and Anne Heche.HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.
Willa Sibert Cather was born on 7th December, 1873 and although born in Virginia grew up and was educated in Nebraska, the eldest of seven children. Although she moved to Pittsburgh for a job on a woman's journal and later to New York City for an editorial post, her successful novels were about frontier life and informed by her experience in Nebraska. The western state's harsh weather and dramatic landscape coupled with the multi cultural immigrant communities and Native American families forging their lives amid such hardships provided a hugely rich seam that she skilfully and movingly expressed in her work. She was critically acclaimed for these books and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1922. Willa was a very private person and whilst she often dressed as a man, nicknamed herself as William and had significant relationships with women, most notably with the editor Edith Lewis who she lived the last 39 years of her life, her sexual identity is not really clear. Willa Cather died 24th April, 1947 having received the Gold Award for Fiction, a prestigious prize awarded once a decade by the National Institute of Arts and Letters for an author's body of work. She was aged 73 and buried on a hillside in New Hampshire where her tombstone reads: The truth and charity of her great spirit will live on in the work which is her enduring gift to her country and all its people.
My Ántonia evokes the Nebraska prairie life of Willa Cather's childhood, and commemorates the spirit and courage of immigrant pioneers in America. One of Cather's earliest novels, written in 1918, it is the story of Ántonia Shimerda, who arrives on the Nebraska frontier as part of a family of Bohemian emigrants. Her story is told through the eyes of Jim Burden, a neighbor who will befriend Ántonia, teach her English, and follow the remarkable story of her life.Working in the fields of waving grass and tall corn that dot the Great Plains, Ántonia forges the durable spirit that will carry her through the challenges she faces when she moves to the city. But only when she returns to the prairie does she recover her strength and regain a sense of purpose in life. In the quiet, probing depth of Willa Cather's art, Ántonia's story becomes a mobbing elegy to those whose persistence and strength helped build the American frontier.
Willa Cather was the 1922 winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Her breakthrough in literature were the three novels featured here in this edition, the so-called Prairie trilogy. All three novels stage in Nebraska and the surrounding Great Plains territory and deal with the life there, family challenges and romance. Featured here are:O Pioneers!The Song of the LarkMy Antonia
"e;One of Ours"e; is the 1922 Pulitzer price winning novel of Willa Cather. Claude Wheeler was "e;one of ours"e; who left his Nebraska farm to fight and die in the Great war. He was an eager, sensitive youth, to whose inarticulate longings life had brought no answer. In the world which seemed so catisfying to all around him he had never felt at home. Except with his mother and faithful old Mahailey. all his relationships had been disappointing and even between himself and his mother her narrow religious beliefs had made a barrier. His marriage proved the crowning disappointment of all. He lived on his prosperous acres in the midst of material plenty, hungry for he knew not what, longing to do something with his life. Miss Gather makes the war a means of release to his baffled soul. He went gladly, never questioning that the call was clear, the cause glorious. He found in Franice the youth he had never had, companionship, a meaning to life, and died before the disillusionment which he could never have borne ...
Women's Short Stories - Volume 2. The short story is often viewed as an inferior relation to the Novel. But it is an art in itself. To take a story and distil its essence into fewer pages while keeping character and plot rounded and driven is not an easy task. Many try and many fail. In this series we look at short stories from many of our most accomplished female writers. Miniature masterpieces with a lot to say. Many of those stories are published in our audiobook version available at iTunes, Amazon and other digital stores.
This carefully crafted ebook: "e;Alexander's Bridge + One of Ours (2 Unabridged Classics)"e; contains 2 books in one volume and is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Alexander's Bridge is the first novel by Willa Cather. First published in 1912, it was re-released with an author's preface in 1922. Bartley Alexander is a construction engineer and world-renowned builder of bridges undergoing a mid-life crisis. Although married to Winifred, Bartley resumes his acquaintance with a former lover, Hilda Burgoyne, in London. The affair gnaws at Bartley's sense of propriety and honor. One of Ours is a novel by Willa Cather. It tells the story of the life of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska native around the turn of the 20th century. Claude, working on the family farm, and married to a woman who is more interested in her missionary work, than she is in him, tires of his monotonous life. When his wife leaves for China, he decides to enlist in the US Army, which has just begun preparing to enter the First World War. Claude believes that he has finally found his purpose in life, a place where he matters. Willa Sibert Cather (1873 - 1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Antonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.
With honesty and tenderness, Jim Burden recounts the life of his Antoniathe free-spirited Bohemian girl who captured his heart and his imagination from their first encounter as young children.My Antonia was critically acclaimed when it was first published in 1918, and was often hailed as a masterpiece, helping build author Willa Cathers reputation as an important American writer in the early twentieth century. The novel starkly represents the lives of those who cultivated the land and society of the American West, and was the third and final book of Cathers prairie trilogy which also included the novels O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark.HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.
Hailed by reviewers and readers for its originality, vitality, and truth, this novel secured Willa Cather a place in the first rank of American writers. Cather called My Antonia the best thing I've done. For Oliver Wendell Holmes, My Antonia had unfailing charm, perhaps not to be defined; a beautiful tenderness, a vivifying imagination that transforms but does not distort or exaggerate. H. L. Mencken declared it one of the best [novels] any American has ever done. Cather drew deeply on her childhood days in frontier Nebraska for this, her fourth novel, published in 1918. Old immigrant neighbors inspired many of the characters, particularly the heroine. Antonia Shimerda is memorable as the warmhearted daughter of Bohemians who must adapt to a hard life on the desolate prairie. She survives and matures, a pioneer woman made radiant by spirit. W. T. Benda's illustrations further illuminate the fiction of a writer who drew so extensively on actual experience.
Willa Cather's third novel, The Song of the Lark, depicts the growth of an artist, singer Thea Kronborg, a character inspired by the Swedish-born immigrant and renowned Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad. Thea's early life, however, has much in common with Cather's own. Set from 1885 to 1909, the novel traces Thea's long journey from her fictional hometown of Moonstone, Colorado, to her source of inspiration in the Southwest, and to New York and the Metropolitan Opera House. As she makes her way in the world from an unlikely background, Thea distills all her experiences and relationships into the power and passion of her singing, despite the cost. The Song of the Lark presents Cather's vision of a true artist.
In Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, we meet Claude Wheeler, a young Nebraskan yearning to escape the life that has been preordained for him. Claude is dissatisfied with farming, alienated from his parents, distant from his wife, and searching for something to believe in. When the country enters the First World War, he finally discovers what he's been looking for. Away from home for the first time, Claude finds the course of his life irrevocably altered by newfound friendships and experiences on distant battlefields.One of Ours continues to be a celebratory tribute — and a grief-stricken remembrance — of World War I. It is at once a courageous and poignant story of American ideals, an extraordinary character sketch, and a disquieting look at the making of an American soldier.
Construction engineer and world-renowned bridge builder Bartley Alexander has everything in mid-life: wealth, good looks, and fame. Yet he finds himself restless and discontented with life — until he meets a former love from his student days and resumes his relationship with her.Living a double life, Alexander is torn between Winifred, his American wife — a cold woman with clearly defined standards — and Hilda Burgoyne, his alluring mistress in London who helps him recapture his youth and sense of freedom. Alexander's affair, which eventually gnaws away at his sense of propriety and honor, proves disastrous.Willa Cather's first novel — a fascinating study of a man's growing awareness of the breach in his integrity—is essential reading for fans of this great American novelist."e; … exceptionally well-conceived and well written."e; — Outlook"e; … told with a good deal of charm and skill."e; — New York Times Book Review"e; … a story of brilliant and unusual power."e; — McClure's
Willa Cather said that O Pioneers! was her first authentic novel, the first time I walked off on my own feet-everything before was half real and half an imitation of writers whom I admired. Cather's novel of life on the Nebraska frontier established her reputation as a writer of great note and marked a significant turning point in her artistic development. No longer would she let literary convention guide the form of her writing; the materials themselves would dictate the structure. Cather's O Pioneers! is the sentimental and somewhat controversial story of the Bergsons, a family of Swedish pioneers that settles for life on the American prairie. While Alexandra, the family matriarch, is able to turn the family farm into a financial success, her brother Emil must grapple with the solace and tragedy of forbidden love. A novel surprisingly ahead of its time, this protofeminist work touches on a wide range of enduring themes, including love, marriage, temptation, and isolation.
Engineer Bartley Alexander appears to have a happy life in Boston with a successful career and a beautiful wife. He has been commissioned to design the Moorlock Bridge in Canada, the most important project of his career. With the onset of middle age, however, he grows increasingly restless and discontented, so much so that while in London he recklessly reignites a love affair with the sweetheart of his youth, the Irish actress Hilda Borgoyne. Although the tryst allows Alexander to recapture an element that has been missing from his pedestrian life, the relationship torments his sense of morality and eventually proves disastrous. Alexander's Bridge explores the demands of Gilded Age society on the individual, as well as the capacity of the individual to violate his own standards of integrity. This Willa Cather Scholarly Edition provides an illuminating new framework for Cather's debut novel. The novel is edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association and presents the full range of biographical, historical, and textual information now available, complete with illustrations and maps.
Here is a story of the prairie in the mid 1800's, when American citizens and European immigrants rushed to the Nebraska prairie to secure their free 160 acres and build their homesteads.
Willa Cather's third novel, The Song of the Lark, depicts the growth of an artist, singer Thea Kronborg, a character inspired by the Swedish-born immigrant and renowned Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad. Thea's early life, however, has much in common with Cather's own. Set from 1885 to 1909, the novel traces Thea's long journey from her fictional hometown of Moonstone, Colorado, to her source of inspiration in the Southwest, and to New York and the Metropolitan Opera House. As she makes her way in the world from an unlikely background, Thea distills all her experiences and relationships into the power and passion of her singing, despite the cost. The Song of the Lark presents Cather's vision of a true artist.
My Ántonia evokes the Nebraska prairie life of Willa Cather's childhood, and commemorates the spirit and courage of immigrant pioneers in America. One of Cather's earliest novels, written in 1918, it is the story of Ántonia Shimerda, who arrives on the Nebraska frontier as part of a family of Bohemian emigrants. Her story is told through the eyes of Jim Burden, a neighbor who will befriend Ántonia, teach her English, and follow the remarkable story of her life.Working in the fields of waving grass and tall corn that dot the Great Plains, Ántonia forges the durable spirit that will carry her through the challenges she faces when she moves to the city. But only when she returns to the prairie does she recover her strength and regain a sense of purpose in life. In the quiet, probing depth of Willa Cather's art, Ántonia's story becomes a mobbing elegy to those whose persistence and strength helped build the American frontier.
A novelist and short-story writer, Willa Cather is today widely regarded as one of the foremost American authors of the twentieth century. Particularly renowned for the memorable women she created for such works as My Ántonia and O Pioneers!, she pens the portrait of another formidable character in The Song of the Lark. This, her third novel, traces the struggle of the woman as artist in an era when a women's role was far more rigidly defined than it is today.The prototype for the main character as a child and adolescent was Cather herself, while a leading Wagnerian soprano at the Metropolitan Opera (Olive Fremstad) became the model for Thea Kronborg, the singer who defies the limitations placed on women of her time and social station to become an international opera star. A coming-of-age novel, important for the issues of gender and class that it explores, The Song of the Lark is one of Cather's most popular and lyrical works.
Set on the Nebraska prairie where Willa Cather (1873–1947) grew up, this powerful early novel tells the story of the young Alexandra Bergson, whose dying father leaves her in charge of the family and of the lands they have struggled to farm. In Alexandra's long flight to survive and succeed, O Pioneers! relates an important chapter in the history of the American frontier.Evoking the harsh grandeur of the prairie, this landmark of American fiction unfurls a saga of love, greed, murder, failed dreams, and hard-won triumph. In the fateful interaction of her characters, Willa Cather compares with keen insight the experiences of Swedish, French, and Bohemian immigrants in the United States. And in her absorbing narrative, she displays the virtuoso storytelling skills that have made her one of the most admired masters of the American novel.
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.
Though best known as an expert chronicler of the American West, Willa Cather's first novel is an in-depth character study of world-renowned bridge designer Bartley Alexander, whose seemingly settled life is thrown into turmoil when he takes up with a former lover during a stay in London. This thought-provoking tale is sure to be a pleasant surprise for fans of Cather's later novels.
This groundbreaking novel from acclaimed American writer Willa Cather was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. The tale follows the ups and downs of the young protagonist Claude Wheeler through his tumultuous transition to adulthood, as he takes on college life, new experiences, marriage, disillusionment, and finally, the ultimate test of courage on the battlefields of World War I. Cather explores with great precision and acuity the travails of an aimless youth, as well as the relief and clarity that discovering one's true purpose in life can bring.
This groundbreaking novel from acclaimed American writer Willa Cather was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. The tale follows the ups and downs of the young protagonist Claude Wheeler through his tumultuous transition to adulthood, as he takes on college life, new experiences, marriage, disillusionment, and finally, the ultimate test of courage on the battlefields of World War I. Cather explores with great precision and acuity the travails of an aimless youth, as well as the relief and clarity that discovering one's true purpose in life can bring.
Though best known as an expert chronicler of the American West, Willa Cather's first novel is an in-depth character study of world-renowned bridge designer Bartley Alexander, whose seemingly settled life is thrown into turmoil when he takes up with a former lover during a stay in London. This thought-provoking tale is sure to be a pleasant surprise for fans of Cather's later novels.
At the turn of the twentieth century. When their father dies young, exhausted by the failure of his attempts at agriculture, it is left to the visionary Alexandra to guide the family to prosperity and safeguard the fortune of her brothers. Strong-willed and fiercely independent, she succeeds against all odds, but only at the cost of her own fulfilment as a woman. Central to the novel's action is the Nebraskan landscape it describes, by turns unyielding and fruitful, bitter and ecstatic.O Pioneers! joins Cather's My Antonia in Everyman's Library.
O Pioneers! is a story of the immigrants who came to America to build new lives for themselves. Struggling against poverty, ignorance, drought, and storm, they came to love and understand the land, until it rewarded them with a richness exceeding all imaginings.The Bergsons are a family of strong-willed Swedish immigrants who have come to make a living on the great prairie. When the father, John, dies, worn out by disease and debt, his eldest daughter, Alexandra, becomes the head of the family. This is the story of her love affair with the landan American Midwest that is vast and golden.
O Pioneers! is a classic moving tale of the frontier told in a powerful style and with a strong sense of character.
Willa Cather's twelfth and final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, is her most intense fictional engagement with political and personal conflict. Set in Cather's Virginia birthplace in 1856, the novel draws on family and local history and the escalating conflicts of the last years of slavery-conflicts in which Cather's family members were deeply involved, both as slave owners and as opponents of slavery. Cather, at five years old, appears as a character in an unprecedented first-person epilogue. Tapping her earliest memories, Cather powerfully and sparely renders a Virginia world that is simultaneously beautiful and, as she said, terrible. The historical essay and explanatory notes explore the novel's grounding in family, local, and national history; show how southern cultures continually shaped Cather's life and work, culminating with this novel; and trace the progress of Cather's research and composition during years of grief and loss that she described as the worst of her life. More early drafts, including manuscript fragments, are available for Sapphira and the Slave Girl than for any other Cather novel, and the revealing textual essay draws on this rich resource to provide new insights into Cather's composition process.
In 1920 Willa Cather collected eight of the stories she had written over the past twenty years into Youth and the Bright Medusa, stories of the perilous pursuit of the bright medusa of art in a hostile, materialistic world. These include some of her best tales: Coming, Aphrodite! focuses on a dedicated painter and his affair with a singer in pursuit of celebrity; Paul's Case and A Wagner Matinee tell of a young man and an old woman with artistic longings crushed by their environments; The Sculptor's Funeral and The Diamond Mine show the high costs of success. The historical essay and explanatory notes trace the composition of the stories and their roots in the people, events, and places Cather knew, from her family to world-famous sopranos, from Nebraska and Wyoming to New York and Pittsburgh, with new information on the sources for Paul's Case. Historical photographs, including a hitherto unknown portrait of the prototype for Paul, show people and places as Cather knew them. The textual essay and apparatus explore the versions that appeared in her lifetime, from first magazine publication to the final collected edition of her works-and describe how the magazine version of Coming, Aphrodite! was censored by the editors, even to the title.
My Antonia, first published 1918, is one of Willa Cather's greatest works. It is the last novel in the Prairie trilogy, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. My Antonia tells the stories of several immigrant families who move out to rural Nebraska to start new lives in America, with a particular focus on a Bohemian family, the Shimerdas, whose eldest daughter is named Antonia. The book's narrator, Jim Burden, arrives in the fictional town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, on the same train as the Shimerdas, as he goes to live with his grandparents after his parents have died. Jim develops strong feelings for Antonia, something between a crush and a filial bond, and the reader views Antonia's life, including its attendant struggles and triumphs, through that lens.
A Swedish family migrate to Nebraska at the turn of the 20th century. The daughter of the family inherits the land when her father dies, and the story follows her struggle to maintain it when many around her are leaving the prairie in defeat. There are two romantic narratives in the novel: that of the daughter and a family friend, and of her brother and a married woman.
Uprooted from a well-ordered life in Virginia when she was nine, Willa Cather came of age in the West during the last years of the American frontier. She developed a love for the beauty of the open grassland and an abiding interest in the Old World customs of her neighbors, the dreamers and builders who inhabit her fiction. This collection includes work from the early part of Cather's career and clearly marks themes and landscapes that she would detail and explore for the remainder of her life. Alongside THE BOHEMIAN GIRL, Harper Perennial will publish the short fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, and Oscar Wilde to be packaged in a beautifully designed, boldly colorful boxset in the aim to attract contemporary fans of short fiction to these revered masters of the form. Also, in each of these selections will appear a story from one of the new collections being published in the Summer of the Short Story. A story from Lydia Peelle's forthcoming collection, REASONS FOR AND ADVANTAGES OF BREATHING, will be printed at the back of this volume.
A Swedish family migrate to Nebraska at the turn of the 20th century. The daughter of the family inherits the land when her father dies, and the story follows her struggle to maintain it when many around her are leaving the prairie in defeat. There are two romantic narratives in the novel: that of the daughter and a family friend, and of her brother and a married woman.
My Antonia, first published 1918, is one of Willa Cather's greatest works. It is the last novel in the Prairie trilogy, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. My Antonia tells the stories of several immigrant families who move out to rural Nebraska to start new lives in America, with a particular focus on a Bohemian family, the Shimerdas, whose eldest daughter is named Antonia. The book's narrator, Jim Burden, arrives in the fictional town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, on the same train as the Shimerdas, as he goes to live with his grandparents after his parents have died. Jim develops strong feelings for Antonia, something between a crush and a filial bond, and the reader views Antonia's life, including its attendant struggles and triumphs, through that lens.
A short story from the Classic Shorts collection: The Bohemian Girl by Willa Cather
Uprooted from a well-ordered life in Virginia when she was nine, Willa Cather came of age in the West during the last years of the American frontier. She developed a love for the beauty of the open grassland and an abiding interest in the Old World customs of her neighbors, the dreamers and builders who inhabit her fiction. This collection includes work from the early part of Cather's career and clearly marks themes and landscapes that she would detail and explore for the remainder of her life. Alongside THE BOHEMIAN GIRL, Harper Perennial will publish the short fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, and Oscar Wilde to be packaged in a beautifully designed, boldly colorful boxset in the aim to attract contemporary fans of short fiction to these revered masters of the form. Also, in each of these selections will appear a story from one of the new collections being published in the "e;Summer of the Short Story."e; A story from Lydia Peelle's forthcoming collection, REASONS FOR AND ADVANTAGES OF BREATHING, will be printed at the back of this volume.
Willa Cather is considered to be one of the best chroniclers of pioneer life in the 20th century. She had a long and distinguished career writing essays, poems, short stories, and novels. This story is a powerful example of a frequent theme: the haunting, sometimes painful, contrast between city and country life.
The 42 page article was extracted from the book: Youth and the Bright Medusa, by Willa Cather.
May 2010 Good Housekeeping selection. On My Bookshelf by Nicci French... I read and re-read My Antonia by Willa Cather, and have passed it on to family and friends. It tells the story of poverty-stricken immigrant families living on the wild plains of Nebraska, and particularly of Antonia, a spirited and generous girl from Bohemia. Fabulous and good for the soul.
`For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious.' Willa Cather's second novel, O Pioneers! (1913) tells the story of Alexandra Bergson and her determination to save her immigrant family's Nebraska farm. Clear-headed and fiercely independent, Alexandra's passionate faith in the prairie makes her a wealthy landowner. By placing a strong, self-reliant woman at the centre of her tale, Cather gives the quintessentially American novel of the soil a radical cast. Yet, although influenced by the democratic utopianism of Walt Whitman and the serene regionalism of Sarah Orne Jewett, O Pioneers! is more than merely an elegy for the lost glories of America's pioneer past. In its rage for order and efficiency, the novel testifies to the cultural politics of the Progressive Era, the period of massive social and economic transformations that helped to modernize the United States in the years between the Civil War and World War. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Since childhood, Claude Wheeler has believed that 'something splendid' would restore the faith he had lost in modern life and the personal compromises and materialism that it brings. The calls of the First World War offers escape from his prosperous farm in Nebraska and marriage of convenience and brings the opportunity to fight for a worthy cause. In action in France he discovers the faith and happiness he has yearned, but not without the heavy cost that war inevitably brings. Willa Cather looks back at the pioneering myth and forward to a new kind of modern heroism through One of Ours, a novel championing democracy.
At the end of the seventeenth century, on that grey rock in the Canadian wilderness known as Quebec, a French family, the Auclairs, begin a life very different from the one they knew in Paris. On her mother's death ten-year-old Cecile is entrusted with the care of the household and of her father, Euclid, the town's apothecary. Two years later, in 1697, as the red-gold autumn sunlight pours over the rock like a heavy southern wine , Cecile and her father prepare for the long, difficult winter ahead with no word from home - news of the world they have left behind must wait until spring, when the annual boats from France are able to make their way up the St Lawrence. For her father, it will be a painful exile, but for the young Cecile life holds innumerable joys as old ties are relinquished and new ones are formed ...
Thea Kronborg is born into poverty in a small desert town in the American Midwest. One of seven children, she is somehow set apart, a fact recognised by the discerning few, including Ray Kennedy, who longs to marry her but whose fate it is to set her free. With her rugged will and pioneer spirit, Thea carves her way from Moonstone, Colorado, to windy Chicago, from Dresden to New York and a triumphant debut at the Metropolitan Opera. She becomes a great opera singer but learns that as a true artist, she must make the most bitter sacrifices of all . . .
This rich selection of Willa Cather's short fiction is drawn from every period of her writing life, and mixes the little known with the much anthologised. Here we have a range of stories from short, vivid sketches to novellas. They tell of the bitter lives of Nebraskan immigrants, and of the pull between provincial America and the cosmopolitan world of art; some of the most poignant deal with the challenges and dilemmas for the American artist. Her marvellous late stories are charged with beautifully controlled feeling, and eloquently describe the tensions and complications of family life. Cather also let herself go in these stories in ways she did not in the longer fiction, with harsh satires of New York, chilling glimpses of the supernatural, and strong expressions of sexual feeling. These are stories that add immeasurably to our perception of Cather's range and complexity.
Originally published in 1940, this is Willa Cather's last novel, a stirring and beautifully executed description of a society and conditions that have vanished forever, and a retrospective portrait of the Old South, with its stain of slavery. By 1856, Sapphira Colbert is one of few Virginians who owns slaves, a policy her husband Henry finds increasingly difficult to countenance. Sapphira presides over her Black Creek Valley property with disciplined resolution and the help of her black maid, Nancy. Henry runs the Mill and sleep there too, their marriage a formality. Sapphira's life is an arid one and, confined to a wheelchair, she has amble opportunity for speculation. When she hears a conversation linking her husbands name to that of Nancy, that speculation festers and the horrific potential of Sapphira's power is unleashed ...
People can be lovers and enemies at the same time. We were...' Through the eyes of a young girl, Nellie, we view the life of Myra, a legend in the Southern town where both were born. Myra has romantically abandoned the luxury she was born into to elope with the impoverished Oswald Henshawe. Twenty-five years later, Nellie is dazzled when she meets them living in the elegant poverty of an apartment frequented by singers, actors, poets - in the heart of the artistic community of old New York. But this shabby gentility gives way to real poverty in a jerrybuilt West Coast hotel, and the high purpose of Myra's life - love itself - is revealed to be the enemy within. A finely-wrought study of the great rewards and punishments love brings, MY MORTAL ENEMY is an exquisite example of Willa Cather's art.
Although the land on which the Nebraska farm boy Claude Wheeler lives is settled, he himself has inherited the pioneer spirit of adventure, the frontiersman's purpose, and the settler's sense of idealism. In One of Ours, Willa Cather explores the dissonance between Claude's attitudes and his physical reality and studies how this conflict affects him. Drawing on her own family's experience of the war through her cousin G. P. Cather, who fought in World War I, Cather observes how an otherwise misdirected young man could find purpose and meaning in war and how his death would affect his family's memories of him. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, One of Ours paints Claude as a young man who seeks an escape from a conventional and unfulfilling life through the realization of something splendid in his military experience in Europe. This Willa Cather Scholarly Edition puts One of Ours in a new and revealing context. The novel is edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association and presents the full range of biographical, historical, and textual information on the novel.
INTRODUCED BY A. S. BYATT 'Willa Cather makes a world which is burningly alive, sometimes lovely, often tragic' Helen Dunmore 'She is undoubtedly one of the greatest American writers' Observer On the eve of his move to a new, more desirable residence, Professor Godfrey St Peter finds himself in the shabby study of his former home. Surrounded by the comforting, familiar sights of his past, he surveys his life and the people he has loved: his wife Lillian, his daughters and, above all, Tom Outland, his most outstanding student and once, his son-in-law to be. Enigmatic and courageous - and a tragic victim of the Great War - Tom has remained a source of inspiration to the professor. But he has also left behind him a troubling legacy which has brought betrayal and fracture to the women he loves most . . .
Something had broken loose in him of which he knew nothing except that it was sullen and powerful, that it wrung and tortured him.' Bartley Alexander, an engineer famous for the audacious structure of his North American bridges, is at the height of his reputation. He has a distinguished and beautiful wife and an enviable Boston home. Then, on a trip to London, he meets again the Irish actress he had once loved. Their affair resumes, and Alexander finds himself caught in a transatlantic tug of emotions - between the wife who has supported his career with understanding and strength and Hilda, whose impulsiveness and generosity restore to him the passion and energy of his youth. Alongside this personal dilemma there are ominous signs of strain in his professional life . . .
In 1851 Bishop Latour and his friend Father Valliant are despatched to New Mexico to reawaken its slumbering Catholicism. Moving along the endless prairies, Latour spreads his faith the only way he knows - gently, although he must contend with the unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Over nearly forty years, they leave converts and enemies, crosses and occasionally ecstasy in their wake. But it takes a death for them to make their mark on the landscape forever . . .
Of Antonia, the passionate heroine of Willa Cather's greatest novel, the narrator says that she left 'images in the mind that did not fade - that grew stronger with time'. The same could be said of the novel itself. On one level it is a straighforward story, beautifully written, of the struggle for survival of a family of pioneers on the vast Nebraska plains. On another it encompasses history, the relationship ofhuman beings and the natural world, and the destiny of the individual - even as it lovingly and unsentimentally portrays a woman whose robust spirit and enduring warmth make her emblematic of what Cather most admired in the American people. 'The time will come when Willa Cather will be ranked above Hemingway.' - Leon Edel
Alexandra Bergson is the eldest child of a Swedish immigrant family newly arrived in the harsh untamed landscape of the American West. An original, determined child, she is driven by two forces: her fierce protective love for her younger brother, and a deep love of the beautiful country she has come to regard as her own. When her father dies, it is she who becomes the head of the family and struggles to soften the wild overgrown soil that surrounds her, nurturing it until, finally, it rewards her with a richness beyond measure..
Marian Forrester brings delight to her husband, an elderly railroad pioneer; to the small town of Sweet Water where they live; and to Niel Herbert, the young narrator of her story, who falls in love with her as a boy and later becomes her confidant. He witnesses this vibrant woman in all her contradictory facets: by turns faithless and steadfast, dazzling and pathetic, invincibly charming yet dangerously vulnerable to the men she charms. All are bewitched by her charisma and grace - and all are ultimately betrayed. 'This classic has the striking economy of Hemingway, and is as poignant an elegy for the pioneer West as I have read. The vivacious Marian Forrester stands as a romantic paean to the pioneer's reckless abandon, counterpointed by the narrator's prim decency' The Times
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY A. S. BYATT 'During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had both known long ago. More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood . . . His mind was full of her that day. He made me see her again, feel her presence, revived all my old affection for her.' My Antonia is the unforgettable story of an immigrant woman's life on the Nebraska plains, seen through the eyes of her childhood friend, Jim Burden. The beautiful, free-spirited, wild-eyed girl captured Jim's imagination long ago and haunts him still, embodying for him the elemental spirit of the American frontier. In this powerful and astonishing novel, Willa Cather created one of the most winning yet thoroughly convincing heroines in American fiction.
This Norton Critical Edition brings to life-through Cather's words, and through the words and images of others-the uniquely American frontier experience. In inscribing a copy of O Pioneers! for a childhood friend, Cather wrote, In this one I hit the home pasture... Contexts and Backgrounds includes a rich selection of autobiographical and biographical remembrances (including three interviews with Cather), literary contexts (by Cather and her contemporaries, Henry James and Sarah Orne Jewett), and writings on the American West (including selected letters that paint a picture of one family's life on the Nebraska prairie). Criticism provides seven contemporary reviews and eight modern critical interpretations by David Stouck, John J. Murphy, C. Susan Wiesenthal, Marilee Lindemann, Melissa Ryan, Guy Reynolds, and Sharon O'Brien.
Shadows on the Rock, written after Willa Cather discovered Quebec City during an unplanned stay in 1928, is the second of her Catholic historical novels and reflects her fascination with finding a little piece of France in eastern Canada. Set in the late seventeenth century, the novel centers on the activities of the widowed apothecary Euclide Auclair and his young daughter, Cecile. To Auclair's house and shop come trappers, missionaries, craftsmen, the indigent-those seeking cures, a taste of France, or liberation from the corruptions caused there by the excesses of the French court. Set against these fictional characters, historical personages such as Bishop Laval, Count Frontenac, and others contend in the political life of the vast colony. This edition, which is approved by the Modern Language Association, will be of special importance to Cather scholars. Not only is Cather's mining of historical sources explored in extensive explanatory notes, but a recently discovered reworked draft of the novel has been incorporated into the textual analysis. There is also a generous illustration section with maps of the setting.
There is a pleasure in listening to the imagery of Alexander's Bridge that is similar to viewing a beautiful watercolor, as in the following description of a Boston street in late afternoon: "e;The sun sank rapidly; the silvery light had faded from the bare boughs and the watery twilight was setting in when Wilson at last walked down the hill, descending into cooler and cooler depths of grayish shadow."e; Against this delicate imagery, Willa Cather renders the tough inner terrain of a man in mid-life crisis. Bartley Alexander is a master bridge engineer. At forty-three he is at the height of his power, comfortable with success and all it brings. Yet he yearns for the lost vibrancy of his youth. He leads a double life, veering between his beautiful, accomplished wife and his mistress, an actress he knew as a student in Paris. This conflict creates a crack in the structure of his life which ultimately undermines him.
Widely recognized as Willa Cather's finest book and one of the outstanding novels of American literature, My ntonia tells of the life of early American pioneers in Nebraska. Through Jim Burden's endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature's most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memories of a fateful sleigh ride, ntonia's desperately homesick father and self-indulgent mother, and the coy Lena Lingard. Holding the pastoral society's heart, of course, is the bewitching, free-spirited ntonia. Infused with a gracious passion for the land, My ntonia is a deeply moving portrait of an entire community and its way of life.
Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel tells of the making of a young American soldier. Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds the purpose he has been searching for all his life. His yearnings impel him toward a frontier wilder and more violent than the one tamed by his pioneer ancestors. One of Ours is a canny and vital portrait of an American psyche at once skeptical and romantic, restless and heroic.
Willa Cather said that O Pioneers! was her first authentic novel, the first time I walked off on my own feet-everything before was half real and half an imitation of writers whom I admired. Cather's novel of life on the Nebraska frontier established her reputation as a writer of great note and marked a significant turning point in her artistic development. No longer would she let literary convention guide the form of her writing; the materials themselves would dictate the structure. The paperback edition contains all the text and scholarly apparatus found in the original Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association, this volume presents the full range of biographical, historical, and textual information on the novel.
First published in 1923, A Lost Lady is one of Willa Cather's classic novels about life on the Great Plains. It harks back to Nebraska's early history and contrasts those days with an unsentimental portrait of the materialistic world that supplanted the frontier. In her subtle portrait of Marian Forrester, whose life unfolds in the midst of this disquieting transition, Cather created one of her most memorable and finely drawn characters. This Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of A Lost Lady is edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association. The historical essay describes the origin, writing, and reception of the novel as well as motion pictures that were later based on it; and a selection of archival photographs illuminates the connection between the novel and the people and places from Cather's formative years in Nebraska. Explanatory notes identify locations, literary references, persons, events, and specialized terminology. The textual essays describe the production and subsequent revisions of the text.
Hailed by reviewers and readers for its originality, vitality, and truth, My Antonia secured Willa Cather's place in the first rank of American writers. Cather drew deeply on her childhood days in frontier Nebraska for her fourth novel, published in 1918. Antonia Shimerda is memorable as the warm-hearted daughter of Bohemians who must adapt to a hard life on the desolate prairie. She survives and matures, a pioneer woman made radiant by spirit. This Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of My Antonia is edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association and it presents the full range of biographical, historical, and textual information on the novel. The selection of W. T. Benda's illustrations and the historical photography and maps also illuminate the fiction of a writer who drew so extensively on actual experience.
The scholarly edition of The Professor's House incorporates into its textual analysis findings from a recently discovered and significantly reworked draft of the novel. Willa Cather's perennial claims that there were no extant drafts make this discovery especially important to Cather scholars. Written in 1925, when she was fifty-two years old, The Professor's House was Cather's seventh novel. Cather explained that in this novel she had attempted two structural experiments. The first experiment she took from the practice of early French and Spanish novelists of inserting a nouvelle into the roman, hence the first-person Tom Outland's Story wedged between the other two parts of the novel. Second, she compared the novel's structure to a sonata form in music, with the center section in significant contrast to the surrounding sections Behind the understated prose relating the story of Professor Godfrey St. Peter, who, despite his success, experiences at midcareer a profound disappointment with life, is the fierce account of how he decides to continue living despite those disappointments. Tom Outland's thrilling tale of a long-lost civilization is both an ironic contrast to the professor's staid outer life and a mirror of the imaginative interior life he experiences in his attic study.
An infamous clause in Willa Cather's will, forbidding publication of her letters and other papers, has long caused consternation among Cather scholars. For Cather, a complex and private person who seldom made revelatory public pronouncements, personal letters provide-or would provide-an especially valuable key to understanding. But because of the terms of her will, that key is not readily available. Cather's letters will not come into public domain until the year 2017. Until then, even quotation, let alone publication in full, is prohibited. Janis P. Stout has gathered over eighteen hundred of Cather's letters--all the letters currently known to be available--and provides a brief summary of each, as well as a biographical directory identifying correspondents and a multisection index of the widely scattered letters organized by location, by correspondent, and by names and titles mentioned. This book will be an essential resource for Cather scholars.
In these masterful short stories, many of which are set against the harsh but spectacular American prairie, Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather has captured the sweeping drama of the West and the spirit of its people. This volume includes her collection The Troll Garden as it appeared originally in 1905, as well as such classic early stories as -The Enchanted Bluff, - -Eric Hermannson's Souls, - and -The Bohemian Girl.- Rich with autobiographical elements from the Nebraska of her childhood, Cather's tales feature complex characters: taciturn Swedes struggling against the unpredictable land; misfit artists alienated from the common people; and women whose dreams clash with the expectations of society. In luminous writing, Cather renders the conflict between character and environment and the pioneer virtues of perseverance, courage, and dignity.
This collection of Willa Cather stories-her first book of fiction and the capstone of her early career-is as relevant today as at the time of its initial publication. As different and individually distinguished as the seven stories may be, they share as their subject the role and status of the artist in American society. The passions, ambitions, and pretensions, the cant and the pathos of the art world, artists, pseudo-artists, aficionados, and dilettantes-all are amply represented here in the midst of their foibles, grand affairs, and failures, drawn with great style and subtlety by a writer gathering her formidable powers. With the psychological precision of her early master Henry James and the practical wisdom and wit of her contemporary Edith Wharton, Cather shows us innocents seduced, sophisticates undone, marriages sundered, idealism compromised, and the rare soul uplifted by art.
Death Comes for the Archbishop sprang from Willa Cather's love for the land and cultures of the American Southwest. Published in 1927 to both praise and perplexity, it has since claimed for itself a major place in twentieth-century literature. When Cather first visited the American Southwest in 1912, she found a new world to imagine and soon came to feel that the story of the Catholic Church in [the Southwest] was the most interesting of all its stories. The narrative follows Bishop Jean Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant, friends since their childhood in France, as they organize the new Roman Catholic diocese of Santa Fe subsequent to the Mexican War. While seeking to revive the church and build a cathedral in the desert, the clerics, like their historical prototypes, Bishop Jean Lamy and Father Joseph Machebeuf, face religious corruption, natural adversity, and the loneliness of living in a strange and unforgiving land. The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition presents groundbreaking research, establishing a new text that reflects Cather's long and deep involvement with her story. The historical essay traces the artistic and spiritual development that led to its writing. The broad-ranging explanatory notes illuminate the elements of French, Mexican, Hispanic, and Native American cultures that meet in the course of the narrative; they also explain the part played by the land and its people-their history, religion, art, and languages. The textual essay and apparatus reveal Cather's creative process and enable the reader to follow the complex history of the text.
The jacket of the first edition of Obscure Destinies announced Three New Stories of the West, heralding Willa Cather's return to what many thought of as her territory-the Great Plains. These three stories, Neighbour Rosicky, Old Mrs. Harris, and Two Friends, reflected her return to the well of memory that had inspired the books that made her reputation. The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition presents for the first time the three stories in their historical and biographical context, with an interpretive historical essay and detailed explanatory notes. The textual essay and apparatus establish the definitive text and trace Cather's changes through newly discovered prepublication versions.
S. S. McClure was one of America's greatest editors and publishers in the lively era of muckraking reform. He is remembered for McClure's Magazine, which early in the twentieth century published the works of famous authors and social reformers. He was also the mentor of young Willa Cather. After leaving her position at McClure's in 1912, Cather ghosted this graceful portrait of her former boss. Cather's developing style is clear throughout The Autobiography of S. S. McClure. She goes far inside her subject to find his voice and catch the rhythms of his exciting life: his immigration from Ireland to America, his Horatio Alger-like rise from poverty and struggle to success. Cather shows the risks he took in forming the first newspaper syndicate in the United States, which gave him access to such literary masters as Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson. His extensive contacts were advantageous later in establishing McClure's, the medium for muckrakers like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens. These famous figures, and many others, enter into The Autobiography of S. S. McClure, which was originally published in 1914, just as Cather was launching her own illustrious career as a novelist
Hailed by reviewers and readers for its originality, vitality, and truth, My Antonia secured Willa Cather's place in the first rank of American writers. Cather drew deeply on her childhood days in frontier Nebraska for her fourth novel, published in 1918. Antonia Shimerda is memorable as the warm-hearted daughter of Bohemians who must adapt to a hard life on the desolate prairie. She survives and matures, a pioneer woman made radiant by spirit. This Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of My Antonia is edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association and it presents the full range of biographical, historical, and textual information on the novel. The selection of W. T. Benda's illustrations and the historical photography and maps also illuminate the fiction of a writer who drew so extensively on actual experience.
This controversial biography of the founder of the Christian Science church was serialized in McClure's Magazine in 1907-8 and published as a book the next year. It disappeared almost overnight and has been difficult to find ever since. Although a Canadian mewspaperwoman named Georgine Milmine collected the material and was credited as the author, The Life Of Mary Baker G. Eddy was actually written by Willa Cather, an editor at McClure's at that time. In his introduction to this Bison Book edition, David Stouck reveals new evidence of Cather's authorship of The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy. He discusses her fidelity to facts and her concern with psychology and philosophy that would take creative form later on. Indeed, this biography contains some of the finest portrait sketches and reflections on human nature that Willa Cather would ever write.
Willa Cather said that O Pioneers! was her first authentic novel, the first time I walked off on my own feet-everything before was half real and half an imitation of writers whom I admired. Cather's novel of life on the Nebraska frontier established her reputation as a writer of great note and marked a significant turning point in her artistic development. No longer would she let literary convention guide the form of her writing; the materials themselves would dictate the structure. The paperback edition contains all the text and scholarly apparatus found in the original Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association, this volume presents the full range of biographical, historical, and textual information on the novel.
As she grew older Willa Cather became ever more private, complaining of favor-seekers and other parasites of fame. But in her long career she granted thirty-four interviews, gave six public speeches, and published ten letters, discussing literature and the artistic life and illuminating her own life and writing. These fugitive pieces, here gathered for the first time, reveal the author's early thirst for fame and the reasons for her later renunciation of it. Included are Cather's radio speech accepting the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for fiction (awarded for One of Ours), accounts of her other speeches, interviews conducted by Louise Bogan and Stephen Vincent Benet, and six little-known portraits of Cather.
Before she wrote her prose masterpieces, Willa Cather produced striking poems, which were collected in 1903 in April Twilights. It was her literary debut, preceding the publication of O Pioneers! by nine years. In her introduction, distinguished Cather scholar Bernice Slote notes that this early edition of April Twilights restores what had been an almost lost, certainly blurred, portion of the creative life of a great novelist. Among the thirty-seven selections are the much-anthologized Grandmither, Think Not I Forget, and the highly evocative Prairie Dawn.
Bartley Alexander, an engineer famous for the audacious structure of his North American bridges, is at the height of his reputation. He has a distinguished and beautiful wife and an enviable Boston home. Then, on a trip to London, he has a chance encounter with an Irish actress he once loved. When their affair re-ignites, Alexander finds himself caught in a tug of emotions--between his feelings for wife, who has supported his career with understanding and strength, and Hilda, whose impulsiveness and generosity restore to him the passion and energy of his youth. Coinciding with this personal dilemma are ominous signs of strain in his professional life. In this, her first novel, originally published in 1912, Willa Cather skillfully explores the struggle between opposing sides of the self, a facility that was to become a hallmark of her craft.
For Willa Cather, the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts. The whole legacy of Western civilization stood on the far side of World War I, and in the spiritually impoverished present she looked back to that. To that she directed readers of these essays, declaring that anyone under forty years old would not be interested in them. But she was wrong: since its first publication in 1936, Not Under Forty has appealed to readers of all ages who share Cather's concern for excellence, for what endures, in literature and in life.
Willa Cather was twenty-eight years old in the summer of 1902 when she saw England and France for the first time. Behind her stretched the Nebraska fields of her childhood and still ahead of her the world as it belongs only to great writers. The 1902 journey, coming ten years before she made her literary mark with O Pioneers!, was unrepeatable, special in its effects on her artistic development. After disembarking at Liverpool, she toured the Shropshire country, got swallowed up by London, and then crossed the Channel to other skies-to Rouen, Paris, and the Riviera. These fourteen travel articles, written for a newspaper in Lincoln, Nebraska, and eventually collected and published in book form in 1956, are striking for first impressions colored by a future novelist's feeling for history and for beauty in unexpected forms.
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there-that, one might say, is created. This famous observation appears in Willa Cather on Writing, a collection of essays and letters first published in 1949. In the course of it Cather writes, with grace and piercing clarity, about her own fiction and that of Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, and Katherine Mansfield, among others. She concludes, Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all-no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself-a game of make-believe, of re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.
It is 1901, and Lucy Gayheart with her 'singular brightness of young beauty', is studying music in the magical smoky city of Chicago. She is courted by handsome Harry Gordon, the most eligible bachelor in Haverford, the Midwestern town she comes from. But Lucy falls in love with middle-aged Sebastien, a famous singer, whose talents and tenderness change her life forever. First published in 1935, this novel of 'achieved simplicity' displays the depth of Willa Cather's sympathy, both for the world of high art and for the reticent decencies of small town life.
Engineer Bartley Alexander appears to have a happy life in Boston with a successful career and a beautiful wife. He has been commissioned to design the Moorlock Bridge in Canada, the most important project of his career. With the onset of middle age, however, he grows increasingly restless and discontented, so much so that while in London he recklessly reignites a love affair with the sweetheart of his youth, the Irish actress Hilda Borgoyne. Although the tryst allows Alexander to recapture an element that has been missing from his pedestrian life, the relationship torments his sense of morality and eventually proves disastrous. Alexander's Bridge explores the demands of Gilded Age society on the individual, as well as the capacity of the individual to violate his own standards of integrity. This Willa Cather Scholarly Edition provides an illuminating new framework for Cather's debut novel. The novel is edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association and presents the full range of biographical, historical, and textual information now available, complete with illustrations and maps.
The seven stories in this volume were written during the ascending and perhaps most triumphant years of Willa Cather's career, the period during which she published nine books, including My Antonia, A Lost Lady, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. For the most part ironic in tone, these stories are, as Bernice Slote observes, bound by the geometrics of urban life-streets and offices, workers and firms, the business world of New York and Pittsburgh, the cities which by 1929 Willa Cather had known well for over thirty years. In her introduction, Slote discusses their biographical elements, connections with earlier and later work, and the intricate patterns that lie below the lucid, shimmering surface of Willa Cather's prose.
One of the few really helpful words I ever heard from an older writer, Willa Cather declared in 1922, I had from Sarah Orne Jewett when she said to me: 'Of course, one day you will write about your own country. In the meantime, get all you can. One must know the world so well before one can know the parish.' Although Cather's first novel about her own country, O Pioneers!, did not appear until 1913, the process of knowing the world and of mastering her craft, so far as it can be traced in her published writing, already had been going on for some twenty years. The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902, is the fourth in a series collecting the work of these years of experiment and discovery. More specifically, it offers a representative collection of Cather's nonfiction writing for newspapers and periodicals during her first decade as a professional writer. Selected from 520 articles and columns, the text is divided into three parts corresponding to major developments in Cather's career-the period from 1893 to 1896 when she first began to write regularly for Lincoln newspapers; the years in Pittsburgh when she was working for the Home Monthly and the Leader and sending her famous Passing Show column back to Nebraska; and the period from the spring of 1900 to 1903, when she freelanced in Pittsburgh and Washington, taught in a Pittsburgh high school, and made her first trip abroad. The text has been edited with three main objectives: 1) to enable the reader to trace Cather's development as a writer; 2) to group the material so that the reader interested in a particular subject-the theatre, or music, or literature, for example-can readily locate pertinent selections; and 3) to provide a context sufficient to relate these pieces to Willa Cather's life and to the times, and to suggest some of their connections with the body of her work. Chronologies have been included for each of the three parts; and the Bibliography is the most complete yet available for the for the nonfiction writing up to 1903. Not the least remarkable feature of this collection is the range and variety of forms and subject matter-reviews (of books, plays, operas, concerts, art exhibits, lectures), feature stories, interviews, straight reportage, columns of miscellaneous comment, and travel letters. Seemingly, with no apparent effort Willa Cather could adjust her sights to any assignment and any audience. And if it is astonishing that she could write so much about so many matters at so many levels, it is perhaps even more astonishing that so much of it was so good. Undeniably, however, the chief interest to the general reader and the peculiar value to the scholar of these journalistic writings reside in their manifold and crucial connections with Cather's later work and in the unparalleled insights they afford into the process by which a gifted writer becomes a great artist.
As well as adding another story to the original forty-four, the revised edition updates and expands the chronology and the bibliographies in the light of recent research. It corrects factual and formal errors in the introduction and notes, and emends misprints in the text.
One of the few really helpful words I ever heard from an older writer, Willa Cather declared in 1922, I had from Sarah Orne Jewett when she said to me: 'Of course, one day you will write about your own country. In the meantime, get all you can. One must know the world so well before one can know the parish.' Although Cather's first novel about her own country, O Pioneers!, did not appear until 1913, the process of knowing the world and of mastering her craft, so far as it can be traced in her published writing, already had been going on for some twenty years. The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902, is the fourth in a series collecting the work of these years of experiment and discovery. More specifically, it offers a representative collection of Cather's nonfiction writing for newspapers and periodicals during her first decade as a professional writer. Selected from 520 articles and columns, the text is divided into three parts corresponding to major developments in Cather's career-the period from 1893 to 1896 when she first began to write regularly for Lincoln newspapers; the years in Pittsburgh when she was working for the Home Monthly and the Leader and sending her famous Passing Show column back to Nebraska; and the period from the spring of 1900 to 1903, when she freelanced in Pittsburgh and Washington, taught in a Pittsburgh high school, and made her first trip abroad. The text has been edited with three main objectives: 1) to enable the reader to trace Cather's development as a writer; 2) to group the material so that the reader interested in a particular subject the theatre, or music, or literature, for example can readily locate pertinent selections; and 3) to provide a context sufficient to relate these pieces to Willa Cather's life and to the times, and to suggest some of their connections with the body of her work. Chronologies have been included for each of the three parts; and the Bibliography is the most complete yet available for the for the nonfiction writing up to 1903. Not the least remarkable feature of this collection is the range and variety of forms and subject matter reviews (of books, plays, operas, concerts, art exhibits, lectures), feature stories, interviews, straight reportage, columns of miscellaneous comment, and travel letters. Seemingly, with no apparent effort Willa Cather could adjust her sights to any assignment and any audience. And if it is astonishing that she could write so much about so many matters at so many levels, it is perhaps even more astonishing that so much of it was so good. Undeniably, however, the chief interest to the general reader and the peculiar value to the scholar of these journalistic writings reside in their manifold and crucial connections with Cather's later work and in the unparalleled insights they afford into the process by which a gifted writer becomes a great artist.
In the stories that comprise The Troll Garden, her first book, Willa Cather evokes the devastated, romantic dreams that haunt her characters. Artists, inveterate sentimentalists, hungering beauties, and demon-ridden ascetics find themselves torn between the need to confess and keep secret their private aspirations. Involved with the hope that destroys the spirit, their lives reflect both the impoverished materialism and the deadly idealism of the Plains country, of the fashionable East, and of London at the turn of the century.
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