Books by Willa Cather

Willa Cather¿s twelfth and final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, is her most intense fictional engagement with political and personal conflict. Set in Cather¿s Virginia birthplace in 1856, the novel draws on family and local history and the escalating conflicts of the last years of slavery¿conflicts in which Cather¿s family members were deeply involved, both as slave owners and as opponents of slavery. Cather, at five years old, appears as a character in an unprecedented first-person epilogue. Tapping her earliest memories, Cather powerfully and sparely renders a Virginia world that is simultaneously beautiful and, as she said, ¿terrible.¿ The historical essay and explanatory notes explore the novel¿s grounding in family, local, and national history; show how southern cultures continually shaped Cather¿s life and work, culminating with this novel; and trace the progress of Cather¿s research and composition during years of grief and loss that she described as the worst of her life. More early drafts, including manuscript fragments, are available for Sapphira and the Slave Girl than for any other Cather novel, and the revealing textual essay draws on this rich resource to provide new insights into Cather¿s composition process.

The seven stories in this volume were written during the ascending and perhaps most triumphant years of Willa Cather's career, the period during which she published nine books, including My Antonia, A Lost Lady, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. For the most part ironic in tone, these stories are bound by the geometrics of urban life.

As 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.

Presents a clean, authoritative text of the first edition and charts the subsequent drastic revisions

Special Large Print edition, with easy to read text, of Willa Cather's classic work.

Cather's subject is the role and status of the artist in American society

This semi-autobiographical short story details how Charlotte Perkins Gilman suffered from postpartum depression and was forced to endure lonely isolation intended to cure hysteria.An unnamed woman regales her story through diary entries as she suffers through enforced isolation. Following a bout of postpartum psychosis, the woman is prescribed bed rest by her physician husband. The couple rent an old mansion in the countryside, and the woman is trapped in an upstairs room with loathsome yellow wallpaper that slowly takes over her mind. She's banned from working or writing and does so secretly while commenting on society's complex patriarchal oppression.First published in 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper is an early feminist short story and an important piece of American literature. This volume features an author biography as well as her essay, 'Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper', not to be missed by fans of feminist writings.