Books by Willa Cather

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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 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 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the first time all the poems from both versions of April Twilights, along with a number of uncollected and previously unpublished poems by Cather, as well as an illuminating selection of her newly released letters.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 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 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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