Willa Cather

Alexander’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.

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.BONUS: The edition includes an excerpt from The Selected Letters of Willa Cather.

Domnisoara Shimerda, curajoasa eroina a romanului Antonia mea, isi petrece copilaria pe paminturile fermei unei familii de imigranti, parintii alaturi de care munceste din greu sa-si cistige existenta. Istoria ei il are drept povestitor pe Jim, un prieten caruia-i schimba viitorul, dar pe care destinul il indeparteaza inca din copilarie. Multi ani mai tirziu, cind se reintilnesc, prietenul de altadata gaseste in Antonia un adevarat filon al vietii, o fiinta care a lasat victorioasa in urma nefericirile trecutului si traieste cu gindul la promisiunile viitorului.

Willa Cather is considered to be one of the best chroniclers of pioneer life in the 20th century. She had a long and distinguished career writing essays, poems, short stories, and novels. This story is a powerful example of a frequent theme: the haunting, sometimes painful, contrast between city and country life.

Catch the holiday spirit with this magical collection of beloved Christmas tales. Christmas favorites from Mark Twain, O. Henry, Willa Cather, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bret Harte and others are lovingly recorded and presented here in one enchanting volume.This collection includes:The Fir Tree, by Hans Christian AndersenThe Burglar's Christmas, by Willa CatherThe Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, by Arthur Conan DoyleHow Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar, by Bret HarteThe Gift of the Magi, by O. HenryA Christmas Inspiration, by Lucy Maud MontgomeryChristmas in Poganuc, by Harriet Beecher StoweChristmas at Thompson Hall, by Anthony TrollopeSusie's Letter from Santa, by Mark Twain

Coming, Aphrodite! is a novel written by Willa Cather, first published in 1920. The story is set in New York City during the early 1900s and follows the life of a young artist named Don Hedger. Don is a talented painter who is struggling to make a name for himself in the competitive art scene of the city. He is also in love with a beautiful, free-spirited woman named Eden Bower, who he believes is the embodiment of the goddess Aphrodite.As Don's career begins to take off, he becomes increasingly entangled in the bohemian lifestyle of the city, which includes parties, drinking, and casual sex. Despite his growing success, he remains obsessed with Eden, who is constantly pushing him away and pursuing her own hedonistic desires.The novel explores themes of love, art, and the pursuit of pleasure, as well as the tension between artistic expression and commercial success. It also touches on issues of gender and sexuality, as Eden is portrayed as a strong, independent woman who refuses to be tied down by societal norms.Overall, Coming, Aphrodite! is a vivid and evocative portrait of the New York art scene during the early 20th century, and a compelling exploration of the human desire for beauty and pleasure.Eden Bower was, at twenty, very much the same person that we all know her to be at forty, except that she knew a great deal less. But one thing she that she was to be Eden Bower. She was like some one standing before a great show window full of beautiful and costly things, deciding which she will order. She understands that they will not all be delivered immediately, but one by one they will arrive at her door.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

A unique compilation of short fiction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather Best known for the distinctive portraits of the people and land of the American West in her prairie novels, Willa Cather is one of the greatest American writers of this century. The fourteen short stories in this richly diverse collection, along with an exemplary introduction by author Cynthia Griffin Wolff, allow for a more complex view of Cather. As a writer she was intrigued by nature's ruthlessness and mankind's limitless potential for brutality and had a passion for the beauty of art. Ranging from the simplicity of Cather's first published story, "Peter" (1892), to the extraordinary eroticism of "Coming, Aphrodite!" (1920), this Twentieth-Century Classics collection is an engaging and triumphant testament to the genius of an American literary icon.

Willa Cather's best known novel is an epic--almost mythic--story of a single human life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert. 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.

Pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1928, questo racconto fu poi raccolto in Obscure Destinies. La storia è un raro capolavoro della letteratura americana moderna, una celebrazione della bella vita e delle brave persone.

Protagonista di questa straordinaria storia d'amore e amicizia è Antonia: pelle bruna, ricci incolti e occhi grandi, è una bambina curiosissima che conduce la vita misera degli agricoltori, ma sogna di imparare a leggere e scrivere. Accanto a lei vive il piccolo Jim, e da quando i due si conoscono niente può separarli. Tra i campi dorati di granturco e l'erba alta e rossa delle campagne del Nebraska, i due ragazzi trascorrono mesi spensierati finché una tragedia colpisce la famiglia di Antonia. Da questo momento, le vite di Jim e Antonia sono destinate a separarsi e a incrociarsi più volte, ma nel cuore di lui rimarrà vivido il ricordo di quella ragazzina tenace dalla risposta sempre pronta. Ed è attraverso le sue parole che seguiamo le vicende di Antonia, messa alla prova da difficoltà umane e naturali ma capace di superare tutto, dalla povertà al fallimento amoroso, con fiducia e caparbietà. Nonostante i maltrattamenti e gli ostacoli, Antonia ricerca fermamente la propria felicità con quella passione tipica dello spirito dei pionieri. "La mia Antonia" unisce garbo, forza e sentimento, grazie alla penna limpida di un'autrice di culto della letteratura americana, che vinse il Premio Pulitzer e ispirò Faulkner, Fitzgerald ed Hemingway.

In this haunting 1935 novel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of My Ántonia performs crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest the impermanence of innocence, the opposition between prairie and city, provincial American values and world culture, and the grandeur, elation, and heartache that await a gifted young woman who leaves her small Nebraska town to pursue a life in art. At the age of eighteen, Lucy Gayheart heads for Chicago to study music. She is beautiful and impressionable and ardent, and these qualities attract the attention of Clement Sebastian, an aging but charismatic singer who exercises all the tragic, sinister fascination of a man who has renounced life only to turn back to seize it one last time. Out of their doomed love affair—and Lucy's fatal estrangement from her origins—Willa Cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a Schubert sonata.

Against Nebraska's panoramic landscape, My Antonia (1918) re-creates the life of an immigrant girl who becomes, in the memories of narrator Jim Burden, the ideal of strong and resourceful womanhood, and a figure of salvation.

Through Jim Burden's endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland, with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature's most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memories of a fateful sleigh ride, Antonia's desperately homesick father and self-indulgent mother, and the coy Lena Lingard. Holding the pastoral society's heart, of course, is the bewitching, free-spirited Antonia.

In 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. 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 a woman who "had that something which fires the imagination, [a woman who] could stop . . . one's breath for a moment by a look or a gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things."

Two kindle edition of the classic Willa Cather novel; includes easy to use navigation.

"Sometimes, when I have watched the bright beginning of a love story, when I have seen a common feeling exalted into beauty by imagination, generosity, and the flaming courage of youth, I have heard again that strange complaint breathed by a dying woman into the stillness of night, like a confession of the soul: 'Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy.'" Willa Cather's protagonist in My Mortal Enemy is Myra Henshawe, who as a young woman gave up a fortune to marry for love—a boldly romantic gesture that became a legend in her family. But this worldly, sarcastic, and perhaps even wicked woman may have been made for something greater than love. In her portrait of Myra and in her exquisitely nuanced depiction of her marriage, Cather shows the evolution of a human spirit as it comes to bridle against the constraints of ordinary happiness and seek an otherworldly fulfillment. My Mortal Enemy is a work whose drama and intensely moral imagination make it unforgettable.

A gentle, hard-working farmer's zest for life touches all who know him

The jacket of the first edition of Obscure Destinies announced â Three New Stories of the West,â heralding Willa Catherâ s return to what many thought of as â herâ territoryâ the Great Plains. These three stories, â Neighbour Rosicky,â â Old Mrs. Harris,â and â Two Friends,â reflected her return to the well of memory that had inspired the books that made her reputation.The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition presents for the first time the three stories in their historical and biographical context, with an interpretive historical essay and detailed explanatory notes. The textual essay and apparatus establish the definitive text and trace Catherâ s changes through newly discovered prepublication versions.

Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully modulated novel, resembles the restless young 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 yearning impels 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, restless and heroic.

O Pioneers! (1913) 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 tragedy, a story of people who do not claim a land so much as they submit to it and, in the process, become greater than they were.

"Paul's Case" was first published in 1905 in Willa Cather's first story collection, The Troll Garden, which began her literary career. When the story was printed in McClure's magazine in May of the same year, it brought Cather to national attention. In 1920 the story was reprinted by Alfred Knopf in Youth and the Bright Medusa. "Paul's Case" examines the dangers of art and the struggles of youthful artists in a commercial world.

Sapphira Dodderidge, a Virginia lady of the 19th century, marries beneath her and becomes irrationally jealous of Nancy, a beautiful slave. One of Cather's later works.

Set in seventeenth-century Canada, an evocation of North American origins highlights the men and women who struggled to adapt to the new world even as they clung to the one they left behind.

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 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.

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

La «signora perduta» che sta al centro di questo romanzo vive nel vecchio West. È bellissima, nobile, affascina tutti. La vediamo attraverso gli occhi adoranti di un ragazzo che nulla ama al mondo quanto farle visita. Ma la «signora perduta» cela in sé un’attrazione per qualcosa che sta tra il losco e il sordido, una sorta di perverso desiderio di degradazione.

As well as adding another story to the original forty-four, the revised edition updates and expands the chronology and the bibliographies in the light of recent research. It corrects factual and formal errors in the introduction and notes, and emends misprints in the text.