Willa Cather
1) My Ántonia
They came to the prairie on the same train: Jim Burden, a ten-year-old orphan from Virginia en route to his new home with his prosperous grandparents, and Ántonia Shimerda, an immigrant from Bohemia, free-spirited and a few years older than Jim, traveling...
2) O Pioneers!
Alexandra...
3) My Antonia
With honesty and tenderness, Jim Burden recounts the life of his Ántonia—the free-spirited Bohemian girl who captured his heart and his imagination from their first encounter as young children.
My Ántonia was critically acclaimed when it was first published in 1918, and was often hailed as a masterpiece, helping build author Willa Cather's reputation as an important American writer in the early twentieth century. The novel starkly
...6) One of Ours
This groundbreaking novel from acclaimed American writer Willa Cather was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. The tale follows the ups and downs of the young protagonist Claude Wheeler through his tumultuous transition to adulthood, as he takes on college life, new experiences, marriage, disillusionment, and finally, the ultimate test of courage on the battlefields of World War I. Cather explores with great precision and acuity the travails of
...Though she later climbed to literary fame on the strength of her novels set in the American frontier such as O Pioneers! and My Antonia, much of Willa Cather's early fiction was set in the upper-crust enclaves of New York and New England. This collection of short stories deftly explores the inner workings of American high society in the early twentieth century, with a few forays into the vast Western plains that served as the backdrop
...Virginia-born writer Willa Cather burst onto the American literary scene with this riveting collection of short stories, all loosely yoked together via the theme of the arts, artists, and creativity. Fans of Cather's later work will be surprised at the sophistication of these assured, mannered early pieces, which hint strongly of her admiration for the fiction of Henry James.
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.
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