Willa Cather

Two nineteenth-century French priests pioneer through the American Southwest in this stunning classic from a Pulitzer Prize–winning author. Following the Mexican-American War, two French Jesuits leave Sandusky, Ohio, on a mission. Bishop Jean Marie Latour and his friend Father Joseph Vaillant are venturing to New Mexico territory to establish a Roman Catholic diocese. But this is no easy task. When the Jesuits arrive in the unforgiving landscape,...

The daughter of a Swedish minister growing up in Colorado, Thea Kronborg's musical talent sets her apart from her contemporaries. Driven by her determination to satisfy her artistic impulse, she moves to Chicago, where she falls in love with a wealthy married man. The novel follows Thea's growth from provincial Midwesterner to acclaimed international opera singer. Her ability to resolve the tensions between her personal and professional lives and...

The Pulitzer Prize—winning author of O Pioneers! presents a moving study of an ambitious woman and her troubled marriage in this 1926 novella. When young Myra Driscoll is forced to choose between a large inheritance from her great-uncle and marrying the man she loves, she follows her heart. She and Oswald Henshawe leave their small Illinois town to pursue a future together in New York City. Years later, fifteen-year-old Nellie Birdseye meets Myra...

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...

Paul had just come in to dress for dinner; he sank into a chair, weak in the knees, and clasped his head in his hands. It was to be worse than jail, even; the tepid waters of Cordelia Street were to close over him finally and forever. The grey monotony stretched before him in hopeless, unrelieved years; Sabbath-school, Young People's Meeting, the yellow-papered room, the damp dish-towels; it all rushed back upon him with sickening vividness. Excerpt...

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

First published in 1922, "One of Ours" is Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize winning story of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska native at the turn of the 20th century. Claude is a young man who finds himself conflicted by the constraints of his overly pious mother and the demands that his father's farm places on his education and life. While attending Temple College, a Christian university, Claude befriends Julius Erlich, whose free-thinking family begins to...

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.

This volume collects 50 of her classic short works, published between 1892 and 1920. Here are: LOU, THE PROPHET PETER A TALE OF THE WHITE PYRAMID A SON OF THE CELESTIAL THE ELOPEMENT OF ALLEN POOLE THE CLEMENCY OF THE COURT "THE FEAR THAT WALKS BY NOONDAY" ON THE DIVIDE A NIGHT AT GREENWAY COURT THE PRINCESS BALADINA - HER ADVENTURE TOMMY, THE UNSENTIMENTAL THE COUNT OF CROW'S NEST WEE WINKIE'S WANDERINGS THE BURGLAR'S CHRISTMAS THE...

A collection containing Alexander's Bridge, O Pioneers!, Song of the Lark, My Antonia, and One of Ours.