Books by Willa Cather

Book SynopsisHarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.My Antonia is Willa Cather's masterpiece about 19th-century Nebraskan pioneers.My Antonia depicts the pioneering period of European settlement on the tall-grass prairie of the American midwest, with its beautiful yet terrifying landscape, rich ethnic mix of immigrants and native-born Americans, and communities who share life''s joys and sorrows.Jim Burden recounts his memories of Antonia Shimerda, whose family settle in Nebraska from Bohemia. Together they share childhoods spent in a new world. Jim leaves the prairie for college and a career in the east, while Antonia devotes herself to her large family and productive farm. Her story is that of the land itself, a moving portrait of endurance and strength.

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Book SynopsisWilla Cather's My Ántonia 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.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 cont

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Book SynopsisThe 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.

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Book SynopsisOne of Cather''s earliest novels written in 1918 is the story of Antonia Shimerda, who arrives on the Nebraska frontier as part of a family of Bohemian emigrants. In quiet, probing depth, the story commemorates the spirit and courage of the immigrant pioneers whose persistence and strength helped build America.

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Book SynopsisThe second novel in Willa Cather’s Great Plains trilogy, is a lyrical coming-of-age story charting the struggles of an artists life. 'Lingers long in the memory' Joyce Carol Oates Thea Kronberg, gifted with a beautiful voice, defies her humble beginnings in Colorado and finds success far from her small hometown. But her achievements come with painful drawbacks. As the distance between Thea and her roots increases, she must fight to find her inner strength and reach her full potential. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PENELOPE LIVELYTrade ReviewWilla Cather makes a world which is burningly alive, sometimes lovely, often tragic -- Helen DunmoreThe Song of the Lark illuminates all her work -- A. S. Byatt

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Book SynopsisINTRODUCED BY A.S. BYATT'She is undoubtedly one of the greatest American writers' OBSERVER 'A triumph' HERMIONE LEE 'Willa Cather makes a world which is burningly alive, sometimes lovely, often tragic' HELEN DUMORE 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 . . .Trade ReviewWilla Cather makes a world which is burningly alive, sometimes lovely, often tragic -- Helen DunmoreShe is undoubtedly one of the greatest American writers * Observer *A triumph -- Hermione LeeThe book holds in majestic and mournful equipoise both the nobility of the civilizing instinct and the certainty of its frustration -- Donald Lyons * The Criterion *

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Book SynopsisA portrait of an enduring friendship, from one of America’s most celebrated novelists.‘Quite simply a masterpiece’ Daily Telegraph Two priests are despatched from Rome to New Mexico to reinvigorate Catholicism among the locals, knowing little of the challenges that await them. 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. ‘Its whole effect works slowly and mysteriously ... a major, and rare, artistic achievement’ AS ByattTrade ReviewIts whole effect works slowly and mysteriously ... a major, and rare, artistic achievement -- A. S. ByattQuite 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...This is a book which I go on rereading. -- A. N. Wilson * Daily Telegraph *

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Book SynopsisThe second novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is a passionate portrait of the artist as a young womanThea 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

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Book SynopsisThe first of Cather’s renowned prairie novels, O Pioneers! established a new voice in American literature—turning the stories of ordinary Midwesterners and immigrants into authentic literary characters.O Pioneers! was Willa Cather's first great novel, and to many it remains her unchallenged masterpiece. No other work of fiction so faithfully conveys both the sharp physical realities and the mythic sweep of the transformation of the American frontier—and the transformation of the people who settled it. Cather's heroine is Alexandra Bergson, who arrives on the wind-blasted prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, as a girl and grows up to make it a prosperous farm. But this archetypal success story is darkened by loss, and Alexandra's devotion to the land may come at the cost of love itself.At once a sophisticated pastoral and a prototype for later feminist novels, O Pioneers! is a work in which triumph is inextricably enmeshed with trag

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Book SynopsisFor the 150th anniversary of Willa Cather's birth, and for the first time in Penguin Classics, her quietly beautiful novel of one man's life as he encounters the harsh landscape of the New Mexico desert and the people who inhabit it, with an introduction by National Book Award finalist Kali Fajardo-AnstineA Penguin Vitae Edition • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 YearsIn 1848, following the US's recent acquisition of the American Southwest from Mexico, the young bishop Father Jean Marie Latour receives instruction from the Vatican to oversee a newly created diocese in New Mexico. With his good friend Father Joseph Vaillant in tow, the pair travel through the unforgiving and seemingly-endless desert on mules in attempt to reclaim the region from corrupt priests who have taken mistresses, exhibited greed, and inflicted abuse and genocide on the Mexican and Indigenous residents. But as Father Latour spends mor

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Book Synopsis''As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine-stains...And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.''My Antonia (1918) depicts the pioneering period of European settlement on the tall-grass prairie of the American midwest, with its beautiful yet terrifying landscape, rich ethnic mix of immigrants and native-born Americans, and communities who share life''s joys and sorrows. Jim Burden recounts his memories of Antonia Shimerda, whose family settle in Nebraska from Bohemia. Together they share childhoods spent in a new world. Jim leaves the prairie for college and a career in the east, while Antonia devotes herself to her large family and productive farm. Her story is that of the land itself, a moving portrait of endurance and strength.Described on publication as ''one of the best [novels] that any American has ever done'', My Antonia paradoxically took Cather out of the rank of provincial novelists as the same time that it celebrated the provinces, and mythologized a period of American history that had to be lost before its value could be understood. 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.

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Book Synopsis''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. ByattTrade ReviewQuite 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 ...This is a book which I go on rereading -- A.N. WilsonIts whole effect works slowly and mysteriously in the reader, and cannot be summed up ... Cather's composed acceptance of mystery is a major, and rare, artistic achievement -- A. S. ByattA tremendous, ranging story, economical and distilled as poetry -- Jane Gardam

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Book SynopsisThe final novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is a celebration of the American midwest with Cather''s strongest heroine at its heartJim and Ántonia 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 Ántonia stays at home, dedicating herself to her farm and family. As the years roll by, Jim will come to view Ántonia 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.Trade ReviewOne of the warmest, most quietly rousing books that I know; a clear-eyed salute to the resilience of the human spirit and the innate hardiness of the immigrants who came across the ocean to start afresh in the golden west -- Guardian * Xan Brooks *No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia -- H. L. MenckenCather was the first great American novelist to make the West - the real West, not the stuff of pulp fiction - her theme. She makes you see, smell, and feel the prairie * Slate *

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Book SynopsisThe first novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is an ode to the American Midwest and the immigrants who transformed itTo 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.Trade ReviewHer voice, laconical and richly sensuous, sings out with a note of unequivocal love for the people she is setting down on the page -- Marina WarnerThe most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us -- Rebecca WestTakes a knife and stabs you through the heart, by its joining of such ravishment with such pessimism * New Yorker *

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Book Synopsis90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksHow light and alive she was! Like a bird caught in a net . . . Marian Forrester enchants everyone around her: her husband, an elderly railroad pioneer; the small town of Sweet Water; and Niel Herbert, her unwavering confidant. Yet, her irresistible charm and dazzling wit conceal a dangerous vulnerability and her greatest secret. A significant inspiration for The Great Gatsby, this exquisite novella is a poignant elegy for a bygone era, fading into history.

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Book SynopsisThe novel that first made Willa Cather famous—a powerfully mythic tale of the American frontier told through the life of one extraordinary woman—in a handsome hardcover volume.No other work of fiction so vividly evokes the harsh beauty and epic sweep of the Nebraska prairies that Cather knew and loved. The heroine of O Pioneers!, Alexandra Bergson, is a young Swedish immigrant at the turn of the twentieth century who inherits her father’s windblasted land and, through years of hard work, turns it into a prosperous farm. Fiercely independent, Alexandra sacrifices love and companionship in her passionate devotion to the land, until tragedy strikes and brings with it the chance for a new life.One of our most beloved classics, one of the great heroines of American literature.

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Book SynopsisAlexander’s Bridge, Willa Cather’s first novel, is a taut psychological drama about the fragility of human connections. Published in 1912, just a year before O Pioneers! made Cather’s name, it features high society on an international stage rather than the immigrant prairie characters she later became known for. The successful and glamorous life of Bartley Alexander, a world-renowned engineer and bridge builder, begins to unravel when he encounters a former lover in London. As he shuttles among his wife in Boston, his old flame in London, and a massive bridge he is building in Canada, Alexander finds himself increasingly tormented. But the threatened collapse of his marriage presages a more fatal catastrophe, one he will risk his life to try to prevent.

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Book SynopsisBefore Willa Cather went on to write the novels that would make her famous, she was known as a poet, the most popular of her poems reprinted many times in national magazines and anthologies. Her first book of poetry, April Twilights, was published in 1903, but Cather significantly revised and expanded it in a 1923 edition entitled April Twilights and Other Poems. This Everyman’s Library edition reproduces for the first time all the poems from both versions of April Twilights, along with a number of uncollected and previously unpublished poems by Cather, as well as an illuminating selection of her newly released letters. In such lyrical poems as “The Hawthorn Tree,” “Winter at Delphi,” “Prairie Spring,” “Poor Marty,” and “Going Home,” Cather exhibits both a finely tuned sensitivity to the beauties of the physical world and a richly symbolic use of the landscapes of myth. The the

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Book SynopsisIn this powerful portrait of the self-making of an artist, Willa Cather created one of her most extraordinary heroines. Thea Kronborg, a minister''s daughter in a provincial Colorado town, seems destined from childhood for a place in the wider world. But as her path to the world stage leads her ever farther from the humble town she can''t forget and from the man she can''t afford to love, Thea learns that her exceptional musical talent and fierce ambition are not enough.  It is in the solitude of a tiny rock chamber high in the side of an Arizona cliff--a cleft in the heart of the world--that Thea comes face to face with her own dreams and desires, stripped clean by the haunting purity of the ruined cliff dwellings and inspired by the whisperings of their ancient dust. Here she finds the courage to seize her future and to use her gifts to catch the shining, elusive element that is life itself--life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop,

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Book SynopsisWilla Cather's masterful 1913 novel marks her return to the Nebraska of her youth, and to the stories of the immigrant settlers she had known during her childhood and teenage years in Red Cloud.

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Book SynopsisIn the final volume in her prairie trilogy, Willa Cather fully transforms memory into art to create her most autobiographical novel.

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Book SynopsisIn this symphonically powerful novel, Willa Cather created one of the most winning heroines in American fiction, a woman whose robust high spirits and calm, undemonstrative strength are emblematic of the virtues Cather most admired in her country. • This 100th Anniversary Edition of Willa Cather’s masterpiece features a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Jane Smiley.Antonia Shimerda is the daughter of Bohemian immigrants struggling with the oceanic loneliness of life on the Nebraska prairie. Through the eyes of Jim Burden, her tutor and disappointed admirer, we follow Antonia from farm to town and through hardships both natural and human, surviving everything from poverty to a failed romance--and not only surviving, but triumphing. In the end, Antonia is exactly what Burden says she is: a woman who had that something which fires the imagination, [a woman who] could stop . . . one's breath for a moment by a l

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Book SynopsisWilla Cather’s story of the missionary priest Father Jean Marie Latour and his work of faith in the wilderness of the Southwest is told with a spare but sensuous directness and profound artistry—with an Introduction by A. S. Byatt.When Latour arrives in 1851 in the territory of New Mexico, newly acquired by the United States, what he finds is a vast desert region of red hills and tortured arroyos that is American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. Over the next four decades, Latour works gently and tirelessly to spread his faith and to build a soaring cathedral out of the local golden rock—while contending with unforgiving terrain, derelict and sometimes rebellious priests, and his own loneliness.Death Comes for the Archbishop shares a limitless, craggy beauty with the New Mexico landscape of desert, mountain, and canyon in which its central action takes place, and its evocations of that landscape and those who

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Book SynopsisFrom one of the most highly acclaimed novelists of the twentieth century: a truly remarkable book (The New York Times), an epic story of a life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert. With a new introduction by Claire Messud.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.

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Book SynopsisA lyrical and bittersweet novel of a middle-aged man losing control of his life that's a brilliant study in emotional dislocation and renewal—from one of the most highly acclaimed authors of the twentieth century.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.

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Book SynopsisWilla Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative of the making of a young American soldier.Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully modulated novel, 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 what he has been searching for all his life.In One of Ours Willa Cather explores the destiny of a grandchild of the pioneers, a young Nebraskan whose yearnings impel him toward a frontier bloodier and more distant than the one that vanished before his birth. In doing so, she creates a canny and extraordinarily vital portrait of an American psyche at once skeptical and romantic, r

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Book SynopsisWilla Cather's novel of seventeenth-century Quebec is a luminous evocation of North American origins, and of the men and women who struggled to adapt to a new world even as they clung to the artifacts and manners of one they left behind.In 1697, Quebec is an island of French civilization perched on a bare gray rock amid a wilderness of trackless forests. For many of its settlers, Quebec is a place of exile, so remote that an entire winter passes without a word from home. But to twelve-year-old Cécile Auclair, the rock is home, where even the formidable Governor Frontenac entertains children in his palace and beavers lie beside the lambs in a Christmas créche. As Cather follows this devout and resourceful child over the course of a year, she re-creates the continent as it must have appeared to its first European inhabitants. And she gives us a spellbinding work of historical fiction in which great events occur first as rumors and then a

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Book SynopsisPresents a clean, authoritative text of the first edition and charts the subsequent drastic revisionsTrade Review"This authoritative edition of Cather's perhaps least understood novel is a welcome addition to the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition, begun under the general editorship of Susan Rosowski and now under that of Guy Reynolds. The Song of the Lark is important for taking the portraits of European immigrants in the US in O Pioneers! and adding the element of art as it traces the evolution of Thea Kronborg from small-town girl to opera singer acclaimed in Chicago, New York, and Europe. . . . Embellished with handsome photographs and presented in an easy-to-read format, this is a necessary edition for any scholar of Cather."—N. Birns, ChoiceTable of ContentsPart I - Friends of ChildhoodPart II - The Song of the LarkPart III - Stupid FacesPart IV - The Ancient PeoplePart V - Dr. Archie's VenturePart VI - KronborgEpilogue

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Book SynopsisSet in the late seventeenth century, the novel centres on the activities of widowed apothecary Euclide Auclair and his young daughter, Cecile. To Auclair's house and shop come trappers, missionaries, craftsmen and the indigent - those seeking cures, a taste of France, or liberation from corruptions caused there by the excesses of the French court.Table of ContentsShadows on the Rock Acknowledgments Historical Apparatus: Historical Essay; On Shadows on the Rock; Illustrations; Explanatory Notes Textual Apparatus: Textual Commentary; Emendations; Notes on Emendations; Rejected Substantives; Word Division

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Book SynopsisIn 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.Trade Review"[Youth and the Bright Medusa is] an invaluable asset to scholars looking for a well-rounded, complete study of Willa Cather's writing. Nothing is left out, nothing is wanting."—Nancee Reeves, Documentary EditingTable of ContentsPrefaceYouth and the Bright MedusaAcknowledgmentsHistorical Apparatus:Historical EssayIllustrationsExplanatory NotesTextual Apparatus:Textual EssayEmendationsNotes on EmendationsTable of Rejected SubstantivesWord Division

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Book SynopsisAn infamous clause in the author's will, forbidding publication of her letters and other papers, has long caused consternation among her scholars. For her, a complex and private person who seldom made revelatory public pronouncements, personal letters provide a valuable key to understanding. This title tells her story.Trade Review"Stout (Texas A & M Univ.) makes a unique contribution to Cather scholarship with this volume. . . . Exemplary in scholarship and design, this volume is an invaluable resource for the study of Willa Cather."—Choice"Stout (English, Texas A&M Univ.), a widely published scholar whose work includes both books and articles on Willa Cather, makes an important contribution to Cather studies with this new title. Cather's heirs have honored a provision in her will that prohibits publication of the letters themselves, which will not fall into the public domain until 2017. . . . This unique book is certainly a very important addition to all literary research collections and to other libraries where Cather studies and scholars are active."—Library Journal"Stout addresses a major need in Cather studies, and she does so with impeccable scholarship and critical acumen."—Susan J. Rosowski, author of Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature"Stout's paraphrases effectively convey a sense of Cather's routines and attitudes. Anyone interested in Cather and the West will find this book invaluable and fascinating."—Journal of the WestTable of ContentsAcknowledgments; Introduction; Format of Entries and List of Abbreviations; A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather; Biographical Directory; Index of Addressees; Index of Names and Works Mentioned; Index of Repositories

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Book SynopsisEngineer 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.Trade Review“This scholarly edition does justice to Cather’s notoriously particular production requirements. The material and editorial quality of the book meets very high standards, with the paper, the visual presentation of the words on the page, the rigor of the editing and proofreading, the thoroughness of the notes, and the detailed explanation of editorial decisions all illustrating impeccable scholarship. The historical essay and the illustrations provide useful information. . . . This volume stands as a model of scrupulous, indeed loving, scholarship. It offers a fully elaborated, beautiful text that even Cather, despite her effort to bury the book, might be proud to acknowledge.”—Great Plains Quarterly

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Book Synopsis 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 Ántonia “the best thing I’ve done.” For Oliver Wendell Holmes, My Ántonia 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. Ántonia 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 illustrationsfurther illTable of ContentsBook I - The ShimerdasBook II - The Hired GirlsBook III - Lena LingardBook IV - The Pioneer Woman's StoryBook V - Cuzak's Boys

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Book SynopsisWilla 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. The Song of the Lark presents Cather's vision of a true artist.Trade Review"This authoritative edition of Cather's perhaps least understood novel is a welcome addition to the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition, begun under the general editorship of Susan Rosowski and now under that of Guy Reynolds. The Song of the Lark is important for taking the portraits of European immigrants in the US in O Pioneers! and adding the element of art as it traces the evolution of Thea Kronborg from small-town girl to opera singer acclaimed in Chicago, New York, and Europe. . . . Embellished with handsome photographs and presented in an easy-to-read format, this is a necessary edition for any scholar of Cather."—N. Birns, ChoiceTable of ContentsPart I - Friends of ChildhoodPart II - The Song of the LarkPart III - Stupid FacesPart IV - The Ancient PeoplePart V - Dr. Archie's VenturePart VI - KronborgEpilogue

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Book SynopsisAs she grew older Willa Cather became ever more private, complaining of favour-seekers and other parasites of fame. But in her long career she granted thirty-four interviews, gave six public speeches, and published ten letters. 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.Trade Review"A valuable book. Bohlke gives us access to complete texts, and his headnotes establish the context and significance of individual entries."—South Atlantic Review.

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Book SynopsisContains the author's essays that are personal on the surface, and stresses upon what impresses her in really good literature.

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Book SynopsisPresents a collection of essays and letters first published in 1949. This work 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".Trade Review"[Willa Cather] is saying the most interesting, most profound things about the art of writing, and the life of art, that have been said in our time certainly, and she does it with immense grace and dignity."—Katherine Anne Porter, New York Times"Like her novels…her criticism has an impeccable distinction of style—it is a criticism démeublé, uncluttered by jargon or pedantry."—Nation

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