Showing results by author "Willa Cather"

Willa Cather's best known novel; a narrative that recounts a life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert.

Through Jim Burden's endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland, with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature's most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memories of a fateful sleigh ride, Antonia's desperately homesick father and self-indulgent mother, and the coy Lena Lingard. Holding the pastoral society's heart, of course, is the bewitching, free-spirited Antonia.

Orphaned at age ten, Jim is traveling west to his grandparents’ home in Black Hawk when he first meets Ántonia, the daughter of a Bohemian family who settles on a neighboring farm. Through sunbaked summers and frigid winters, Ántonia bears the hardships of a young immigrant as she longs for a vanishing past. 

On the harsh and wild frontier of the American West, Alexandra Bergson struggles to fulfill her father's dying wish of establishing his family on the Nebraska table lands. Through hard times and abundant, through love and loss, through joy and suffering, Alexandra challenges both her family and the land in her quiet, honest way.

My Ántonia tells the stories of several immigrant families who move out to rural Nebraska to start new lives in America, with a particular focus on a Bohemian family, the Shimerdas, whose eldest daughter is named Ántonia. The book's narrator, Jim Burden, arrives in the fictional town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, on the same train as the Shimerdas, as he travels to live with his grandparents after his parents have died.

Life on The Divide was a struggle for the pioneering Bergson family. Alexandra, all at once tough as nails and tender as a budding blossom, faces and conquers the harsh realities of early settlers in Nebraska. The struggle for life, love, and meaning permeate this timeless classic. Willa Cather captures the imagination with her vivid portrayals of landscape and the enduring desire to achieve a dream.

This varied assortment of Ms. Cather's gorgeous writing includes: "Flora and Her Artists", "The Sculptor's Funeral", "The Garden Lodge", "A Death in the Desert", "The Marriage of Phaedra", "A Wagner Matinee", and "Paul's Case". 

Claude Wheeler resembles the youngest son of an American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.

After the death of his parents, Jim is sent to live with his grandparents on the Nebraska plains. By chance, on the same train is a bright-eyed girl, Antonia, who will become his neighbor and lifelong friend. Her family has emigrated from Bohemia to start a new life of farming, but they soon lose their money and must work hard just to survive. Through it all, Antonia retains her natural pride and free spirit.

In 1697, Quebec is an island of French civilization perched on a bare gray rock amid a wilderness of trackless forests. For many of its settlers, Quebec is a place of exile, so remote that an entire winter passes without a word from home. But to 12-year-old Cécile Auclair, the rock is home, where even the formidable Governor Frontenac entertains children in his palace and beavers lie beside the lambs in a Christmas créche.

Spirited, courageous, and independent, the daughter of Swedish immigrants, Alexandra assumes responsibility for the family farm and her family upon the death of her father. Her devotion to the harsh, forbidding prairie transforms her land and her life.

A study in emotional dislocation and renewal. Professor Godfrey St. Peter, a man in his 50s, has achieved what would seem to be remarkable success. When called on to move to a more comfortable home, something in him rebels.

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. Her ability to resolve the tensions between her personal and professional lives and to communicate through her art makes her an unusual and thoroughly modern heroine.

Life was hard on the Nebraska prairie, but for Alexandra Bergson, daughter of a Swedish immigrant family, her love of the land gave her courage and strength. When Alexandra's father dies, she takes over the care of her family and management of the farm, so that the Bergsons can stay in the place they've chosen for their home. O Pioneers! tells the story of a remarkable heroine, and draws on Cather's own experience growing up on the lonely and wild American prairies.

A portrait of a woman who reflects the conventions of her age even as she defies them and whose transformations embody the decline and coarsening of the American frontier.

"Paul's Case" was first published in 1905 in Willa Cather's first collection, The Troll Garden, which began her literary career. When the story was printed in McClure's magazine in May of the same year, it brought Cather to national attention. In 1920 the story was reprinted by Alfred Knopf in Youth and the Bright Medusa. "Paul's Case" examines the dangers of art and the struggles of youthful artists in a commercial world.

Willa Cather was perhaps most famous for her great novels such as My Antonia and Death Comes to the Archbishop. However, her short stories were enchanting and practical, local and cosmopolitan. Of the great American writers of the early part of the twentieth century she stood alone in her vision. No American writer ever had her breadth of experience and knowledge of people and places, relating to farmers in Nebraska, to barons in New York, and artists in Paris.

Sapphira Dodderidge, a Virginia lady of the 19th century, marries beneath her and becomes irrationally jealous of Nancy, a beautiful slave. One of Cather's later works.

"Paul's Case" was first published in 1905 in Cather's first collection of short stories, titled The Troll Garden. Similar to "The Enchanted Forest" featured in her Nine Stories published by Simply, it is one of the great writer's stories accessible to most young people in high school and college. It relates to what they feel, think, and want to be. Perhaps just as importantly, it depicts young people upset by their current circumstances, their families, and the drabness they perceive in their own lives.

The Shimerda family come to Nebraska from Bohemia - but they find the promised land of opportunity a harsh and unforgiving reality. Young Jim Burden - the narrator of the tale - who lives with his grandparents on a homestead nearby, finds ways to be neighborly and to help the Shimerdas and in the process comes to befriend the daughter of the family, Ántonia. For Jim, Ántonia is an embodiment of the female pioneer.