Willa Cather

In this haunting 1935 novel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of My Ántonia performs crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction: 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

...

In her final novel, Willa Cather departed from her usual Great Plains settings to plumb the turbulent relationships between slaves and their owners in the antebellum South. "Sapphira and the Slave Girl "is set in Virginia just before the Civil War. Sapphira is a slave owner who feels she has come down in the world and channels her resentments into jealousy of her beautiful mulatto slave, Nancy. Sapphira's daughter Rachel, an abolitionist, opposes...

"In 1896 ... Sarah Orne Jewett published her finest work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, about a woman writer who retreats one summer to Dunnet Landing, a Maine seacoast town, to find seclusion to do her work. In the novel and stories collected here, Jewett explores the world of the lonely inhabitants of once-prosperous coastal towns, offering a detailed view of lives molded by the long Maine winters, by the surrounding rock-filled fields, and by...

Here are some of the most powerful and enchanting works by this renowned Southern author, contrasting grace and old-world charm with a new generation.

At the turn of the century, an immigrant's daughter inherits her family's Nebraska farm and her father's fierce love for the land. Fifteen years later she has made the family a fortune through her canny management of the farm, but has never forgotten the young man who left the prairie to seek his fortune.

A collection of three novellas honoring the settlers of the American plains.

A first publication of the acclaimed writer's personal correspondences includes whimsical teenage reports of her 1880s Red Cloud life, letters written during her early journalism years and the 1940s exchanges penned in observation of World War II and her own struggles with aging. -- Publishers Description.