Willa Cather

My Antonia

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.

A Lost Lady

My Ántonia

A gentle, hard-working farmer's zest for life touches all who know him.

Neighbour Rosicky

O pioneers!

Willa Cather's best known novel is an epic—almost mythic—story of a single human life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert. In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows--gently, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Out of these events, Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended. BONUS: The edition includes an excerpt from The Selected Letters of Willa Cather.

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Coming, Aphrodite

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, Thea’s ambition drives her still further—to 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 Cather’s 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.

Prairie Trilogy Volume 2

The Song Of The Lark

A Lost Lady (Virago Modern Classics)

The most complete collection available of Willa Cather's remarkable short fiction, Collected Stories brings together all the stories published in book form during her lifetime along with two additional volumes compiled after her death. These nineteen stories resonate with all the great themes that Cather staked out like tracts of fertile land: the plight of people hungry for beauty in a country that has no room for it; the mysterious arc of human lives; and the ways the American frontier transformed the strangers who came to it, turning them imperceptibly into Americans. In these fictions, Cather displays her vast moral vision, her unerring sense of place, and her ability to find the one detail or episode that makes a closed life open wide in a single exhilarating moment.

Collected Stories of Willa Cather

Owen Wister

Zane Grey

Max Brand [pseudonym]

Classic Westerns

On the Gulls' Road is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in McClure's in December 1908. Another painter visits the narrator and he is mesmerised by his painting of Alexandra Ebbling. The narrator then thinks back to how he met her, on a ship from Genoa to the New York City, after living in Rome for work for two years. They start talking, stop in Naples for a day, then sail by Sardinia. He moves on to doing a portrait of her, and he gives her a bunch of magnolias he got in Gibraltar and she talks about her ailment for the first time. Two days later when he sees her husband neglects her just before going to a concert on the ship, he goes and tells her they should run away together because they love each other. She explains she can't because she is ill. She gives him a box that he shall only open sometime later, when she tells him to by letter. She then takes a ship back to her father's in Norway without her husband. The following March, he receives a letter from him saying she has died. There is also a letter from her, telling him he can open the box now. Inside, there is a magnolia, strands of her hair, and two pink shells. Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 - 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 the age of 33 she moved to New York, where she lived for the rest of her life."

On the Gull's Road

Best known for the distinctive portraits of the people and land of the American West in her prairie novels, Willa Cather is one of the greatest American writers of this century. The fourteen short stories in this richly diverse collection, along with an exemplary introduction by author Cynthia Griffin Wolff, allow for a more complex view of Cather. As a writer she was intrigued by nature's ruthlessness and mankind's limitless potential for brutality and had a passion for the beauty of art. Ranging from the simplicity of Cather's first published story, "Peter" (1892), to the extraordinary eroticism of "Coming, Aphrodite!" (1920), this Twentieth-Century Classics collection is an engaging and triumphant testament to the genius of an American literary icon. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Coming, Aphrodite!

Tom Quirk

Successful engineer Bartley Alexander is torn between his career, his wife, and his passion for an Irish actress. In the only critical edition available of Willa Cather's classic first novel, we see how Cather uses urban settings and the figure of the bridge-builder to analyze America's emergence as an international, industrial power at the turn of the century.

Alexander's Bridge

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.

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Alexander's Bridges

Alexander's Bridge was Willa Cather's first novel. It was originally published in 1912, then released a second time in 1922 after Cather had established her repuation. The second edition contained an author's preface. The book is about Bartley Alexander, a world-famous bridge designer, who struggles with integrity and infedility issues as he carries on an affair with his former lover, Hilda Burgoyne.

An Evocation of a Tragic Love Triangle

The story follows the life of Bartley Alexander, a successful and ambitious engineer who is at the peak of his career. He is married to Winifred, a woman from a prominent Boston family. Bartley's career takes him around the world, working on various engineering projects, and he becomes highly regarded in his field. However, as Bartley's career flourishes, his marriage begins to suffer. He becomes increasingly distant from Winifred and finds himself drawn to Hilda Burgoyne, a talented and passionate actress he meets during one of his business trips. Bartley is torn between his commitment to his wife and his growing feelings for Hilda. The novel explores themes of love, ambition, duty, and the consequences of one's choices. Bartley must confront the conflicts between his personal desires and societal expectations, ultimately leading to a dramatic and life-altering decision.

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

Willa Cather

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