Showing results by author "Willa Cather" in All Categories

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.

Published in 1915 and set in the 1890s, The Song of the Lark tells the story of Thea Kronberg, a gifted young singer who blazes her way into the world’s greatest opera houses. Thea’s arduous journey begins in Moonstone, Colorado, a burgeoning Western town, where she is one of seven children. Following an artistic awakening at an Arizona canyon, she eventually finds fame as an acclaimed opera singer, performing in Germany and at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.

Willa Cather renders the tough inner terrain of a man in mid-life crisis. Bartley Alexander is a master bridge engineer. At 43 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. The conflict creates a crack in the structure of his life that ultimately undermines him.

O Pioneers! is a 1913 novel by Willa Cather, the first of her “prairie trilogy” of novels. It 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 protagonist, Alexandra Bergson, inherits the family farm when her father dies, and devotes her life to making the farm a success at a time when many other families are giving up and leaving the land.

"Death Comes for the Archbishop" is a masterful work of historical fiction by Willa Cather. Set in the American Southwest in the mid-19th century, the novel tells the story of a young French priest who is sent to establish a Catholic diocese in a rugged and unfamiliar land. Through his encounters with the indigenous people and his fellow settlers, the priest comes to understand the complexities and beauty of the human spirit.

Orphaned at age ten, Jim is traveling west to his grandparents’ home in Black Hawk when he first meets Ántonia, the daughter of a Bohemian family who settles on a neighboring farm. Through sunbaked summers and frigid winters, Ántonia bears the hardships of a young immigrant as she longs for a vanishing past.

When the New Mexico territory is annexed by the United States in the mid-1800's, the Catholic Church decides it is time to re-assert its authority in the region which, due to centuries of neglect, is now a haven for corrupt priests. The Vatican chooses Father Jean Marie Latour, a French Jesuit living in Ohio, to accomplish this task, and soon after elevating him to bishop, sends him on his journey into the Wild West.

In this semiautobiographical portrait of a young artist, 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 hometown will not satisfy. With the support of a few allies who recognize her rare qualities, she follows her ambitions to the 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.

The lure of the American West is in the spirit of adventure, in the majestic expanse of unconquered wilderness and in rugged individuals on a quest for identity and sometimes for survival. Owen Wister's unsmiling Virginian... Dorothy M. Johnson's, "A Man Called Horse": These are a few of the colorful, even legendary characters who populate The American West in Fiction, a collection of stories edited by Jon Tuska.

Presented here is Volume IV of our Feminist Literary Classics series, featuring three of the most important feminist works ever written: A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather.

Mental illness though can still carry a stigma. A case of ‘you’re not trying hard enough’, ‘or knuckling down and getting on with it’. But in more recent decades mental issues have come to be recognised as an illness, a disease rather than an affliction. We all remember horror stories of lobotomy’s and electric shock being used to ‘cure’ what society viewed as anti-social behaviour but illness, mental or physical is very real. Depression, schizophrenia, breakdown, psychosis are alarming events to have or to witness.

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. They can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made. If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something.

Myra Henshawe gave up her uncle's fortune for love. Having eloped with her husband, they embarked on a journey that can only be deemed as ordinary. As their lives play out, Myra begins to regret the decisions she had made in life, leading their marriage—and her health—to its demise. In this thought-provoking novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather paints a picture of American normalcy riddled with life's regrets and scorned love.

First published in 1918, My Antonia is the final book of Willa Cather’s "prairie trilogy" of novels, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. This is a coming-of-age story about the orphaned boy Jim Burden growing up on his grandparents' farm in Nebraska and his lifelong friendship with Ántonia Shimerda, the eldest daughter of an immigrant family from Bohemia.

In this volume our authors explore the terrors of the mind rather than the horrors of reality, although with their pens the difference makes little difference. We twist this way and that as their talents shape our path towards endings of the nerve-shredding kind.

Marian Forrester arrives in Sweet Water as the treasured bride of a retired builder. To her husband she embodies the idealism of this railroad town on the Western plains. And to Niel Herbert, a smitten young local boy, she’s so perfect as to belong to a different world. But as Niel comes of age, the fortunes of Sweet Water decline, and as the promise of the frontier fades, his perception of the fallible woman he has idolized since boyhood is shattered.

Christmas may come but once a year but human emotions, the driving force of our characters, are with us every day. Yet, somehow these same emotions when they happen at Christmas seem amplified; we seem more tender to their touch, their words. Whether it’s a long-lost returning soldier wondering how best to return to the arms of his family without too great a risk of shock... Or a prodigal son whose taken path has driven pain into his own and others hearts… These stories reveal much about the human condition.

Inspired by real-life characters and events, Willa Cather’s historical novel follows the committed efforts of two friends, Bishop Jean Marie Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant, to establish a diocese in the newly acquired US territory of New Mexico. Their arduous and picaresque journey is set against a gorgeous landscape of mesas, canyons, and arroyos inhabited by the Pueblo, Hopi, and Navajo people, the place becoming almost another character itself.

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, 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 Ántonia, something between a crush and a filial bond, and the reader views Ántonia’s life, including its attendant struggles and triumphs, ...

The story of a man who does not want to leave his old study for a new house.