Willa Cather

A New York lawyer remembers his boyhood in Nebraska and his friendship with a pioneer Bohemian girl. A novel set in Nebraska about pioneering Bohemian farmers & of the courageous heroine, Antonia. First published in 1918. In Willa Cather's own estimation, My Antonia, first published in 1918, was "the best thing I've ever done." An enduring paperback bestseller on Houghton Mifflin's literary list, this hauntingly eloquent classic now boasts a new foreword...

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. With strength and resoluteness, she turns the wild landscape into orderly fields.

The professor's house was published in 1925, when she was fifty-two. At the time she was an author with a worldwide reputation, having won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of ours. Reaching the top of her profession had produced a letdown, and she later wrote that around the time she won the Pulitzer she had felt that for her the world had broken in two. The situation of the professor in this novel reflects the troubled time in Cather's own life....

The 6 works collected in this volume are at once intensely lyrical and formally perfect. Their fascination with Catholicism in the American Southwest (The Professor's House, Death Comes for the Archbishop) and in early Canada (Shadows on the Rock) reflects the older Cather's search for alternatives to the grasping civilization she felt was increasingly replacing the spirit of the early midwestern pioneers. This conflict is dramatized in A Lost Lady....