Books by Willa Cather

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston. He had lived there as a student, but for twenty years and more, since he had been Professor of Philosophy in a Western university, he had seldom come East except to take a steamer for some foreign port. Wilson was standing quite still, contemplating with a whimsical smile the slanting street, with its worn paving, its irregular, gravely colored houses, and the row of naked trees on which the thin sunlight was still shining. The gleam of the river at the foot of the hill made him blink a little, not so much because it was too bright as because he found it so pleasant. The few passers-by glanced at him unconcernedly, and even the children who hurried along with their school-bags under their arms seemed to find it perfectly natural that a tall brown gentleman should be standing there, looking up through his glasses at the gray housetops.

At the turn of the twentieth century. Central to the novel's action is the Nebraskan landscape it describes, by turns unyielding and fruitful, bitter and ecstatic.O Pioneers! joins Cather's My Antonia in Everyman's Library.

Presents 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".

My Antonia took Cather out of the rank of provincial novelists while at the same time celebrating the provinces. It depicts the pioneering period of European settlement in the American prairie, through the stories of Jim Burden and Antonia Shimerda, who is the embodiment of the pioneer spirit.

* The Cinderella story of Thea Kronborg, rescued from obscurity in the American Midwest by her exquisite voice* Strongly autobiographical* 'The Song of the Lark illuminates all her work' A.S. BYATT

Willa Cather's second novel, O Pioneers! (1913) tells the story of Alexandra Bergson and her determination to save her immigrant family's Nebraska farm. By placing a strong, self-reliant woman at the centre of her tale, Cather gives the quintessentially American novel of the soil a radical cast. Yet, although influenced by the democratic utopianism of Walt Whitman and the serene regionalism of Sarah Orne Jewett, O Pioneers! is more than merely anelegy for the lost glories of America's pioneer past. In its rage for order and efficiency, the novel testifies to the cultural politics of the Progressive Era, the period of massive social and economic transformations that helped to modernize the United States in the years between the Civil War and WorldWar.

A rich and suggestive work which contrasts the middle-aged disillusion of Professor St Peter with his memories of his favourite student, the brilliant explorer and inventor Tom Outland

During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had both known long ago. More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood . . . His mind was full of her that day. He made me see her again, feel her presence, revived all my old affection for her.'MY ANTONIA is the unforgettable story of an immigrant woman's life on the Nebraska plains, seen through the eyes of her childhood friend, Jim Burden. The beautiful, free-spirited, wild-eyed girl captured Jim's imagination long ago and haunts him still, embodying for him the elemental spirit of the American frontier.

Willa Cather's best known novel; a narrative that recounts a life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert.

A portrait of a woman who reflects the conventions of her age even as she defies them and whose transformations embody the decline and coarsening of the American frontier.

With an Afterword by A.S. Byatt