Willa Cather

Special Large Print edition, with easy to read text, of Willa Cather's classic work.

"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."

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 her mother's increasingly shocking attempts to persecute Nancy. The struggles of these three strong-willed women provide rich material for Cather's narrative art and psychological insight.

Set in the background of a farming community in Nebraska at the turn of the century, O Pioneers depicts the struggle and triumph of a twenty-five year old Swedish immigrant who inherits her father's farm. Determined to make the farm a successful enterprise, she devotes her life to her family's land, while other immigrants in the community lose faith in farming and abandon the prairie.

Born of Cather's early ties to the prairie and the immigrants who tamed it, O Pioneers! established a new territory in American literature when it was published in 1913.When Alexandra Bergson, the daughter of Swedish immigrants, takes over the family farm after her father's death, she falls under the spell of the rich, forbidding Nebraska prairie. Strong and resolute, she turns the wild landscape into orderly fields. In her transformation of ordinary Americans into authentic literary characters, Cather discovered her own voice, exploring themes that would reverberate in her later works.

The Song of the Lark is the third novel by American author Willa Cather. The title comes from a painting of the same name by Jules Adolphe Aim Louis Breton. The story is about an ambitious young woman, Thea Kronborg, who leaves her town to go to the city to fulfill her dream of becoming an opera star.