Willa Cather

In 1851, following the United States's recent acquisition of the American Southwest from Mexico, the young bishop Father Jean Marie Latour receives instruction from the Vatican to oversee a newly created diocese in New Mexico. With his good friend Father Joseph Vaillant in tow, the pair travel through the harsh and seemingly endless desert on mules in an attempt to convert local residents to the Catholic faith and build a Romanesque cathedral in Santa...

A haunting tribute to the heroic pioneers who shaped the American Midwest This powerful novel by Willa Cather is considered to be one of her finest works and placed Cather in the forefront of women novelists. It tells the stories of several immigrant families who start new lives in America in rural Nebraska. This powerful tribute to the quiet heroism of those whose struggles and triumphs shaped the American Midwest highlights the role of women pioneers,...

Packaged in handsome, affordable trade editions, Clydesdale Classics is a new series of essential literary works. It features literary phenomena with influence and themes so great that, after their publication, they changed literature forever. From the musings of literary geniuses like Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the striking personal narrative of Solomon Northup in Twelve Years a Slave, this new series is a comprehensive collection...

First published in 1925, "The Professor's House" is the profound study of a middle-aged man's unhappiness by critically acclaimed American author Willa Cather. The novel tells the story of its central character, Professor Godfrey St. Peter, in three parts. In the first part, the Professor feels that he is losing control over his life and resists the direction it is taking. He is displeased with his family's move to a new house, with his daughters...

To the people of Sweet Water, a fading railroad town on the Western plains, Mrs. Forrester is the resident aristocrat, at once gracious and comfortably remote. To her aging husband she is a treasure whose value increases as his powers fail. To Niel Herbert, who falls in love with her as a boy and becomes her confidant as man, Mrs. Forrester is by turns steadfast and faithless, dazzling and pathetic: a woman whose charm is intertwined with terrifying...

This collection of Willa Cather stories-her first book of fiction and the capstone of her early career-is as relevant today as at the time of its initial publication. As different and individually distinguished as the seven stories may be, they share as their subject the role and status of the artist in American society. The passions, ambitions, and pretensions, the cant and the pathos of the art world, artists, pseudo-artists, aficionados, and dilettantes-all...

First published in 1918, My Ántonia is the unforgettable story of an immigrant woman's life on the hardscrabble Nebraska plains. Together here with O Pioneers!, a classic American tale of pioneer life and the transformation of the frontier, this volume of Willa Cather's works captures a time, a place, and a spirit that are part of our national heritage.

A short story from the Classic Shorts collection: The Bohemian Girl by Willa Cather.

The Prairie Trilogy collects three of Willa Cather's seminal novels of life and love on the prairie in one enthralling volume. All three novels feature strong female protagonists like O Pioneers' Alexandra Bergsons, who inherits her family's ailing Nebraska farm, and turns it into a successful enterprise before passion and love intervene. The Song of the Lark follows young Thea Kronborg's growth from a provincial midwesterner to an acclaimed international...

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.