Willa Cather

In the late nineteenth century, a fourteen-year-old immigrant girl from Bohemia and a ten-year-old orphan boy arrive in Black Hawk, Nebraska, and in teaching each other form a frienship that will last a lifetime.

My Ántonia, 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 Ántonia 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 Ántonia. The book's narrator,

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Construction engineer Bartley Alexander is a troubled, middle-aged man torn between Winifred, his American wife - a cold woman with clearly defined standards - and Hilda Burgoyne - an alluring mistress in London who has helped him recapture his youth and sense of freedom. Alexander's relationship with Hilda gnaws away at his sense of propriety and honor and eventually proves disastrous. (He is with Hilda when a messenger, unable to find him, fails...

The Pulitzer Prize—winning author of O Pioneers! presents a moving study of an ambitious woman and her troubled marriage in this 1926 novella. When young Myra Driscoll is forced to choose between a large inheritance from her great-uncle and marrying the man she loves, she follows her heart. She and Oswald Henshawe leave their small Illinois town to pursue a future together in New York City. Years later, fifteen-year-old Nellie Birdseye meets Myra...

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

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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...

From one of America's major writers of the 20th century: five short stories celebrating the land and its pioneers, including the title story and "A Wagner Matinee," both revised by Cather for publication in 1920; "Lou, the Prophet" (1892), "Eric Hermannson's Soul" (1900), and "The Enchanted Bluff" (1909).

In Willa Cather's The Burglar's Christmas‚ 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 burglar's desperate act leads to a transformative act of holiday love and charity. First published...

The Prairie Trilogy collects three of Willa Cather's seminal novels of life and love on the prairie in one enthralling volume. All three novels feature strong female protagonists like O Pioneers' Alexandra Bergsons, who inherits her family's ailing Nebraska farm, and turns it into a successful enterprise before passion and love intervene. The Song of the Lark follows young Thea Kronborg's growth from a provincial midwesterner to an acclaimed international...

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.