Willa Cather

Death Comes for the Archbishop is Cather's masterpiece of life, death, and faith in New Mexico, now part of the Modern Classics collection. Two French priests, friends since childhood, are sent to the newly created diocese of New Mexico. Life there is hard and frequently dangerous. Journeys between parishes are beset by the perils of bandits and storms. The people...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books How light and alive she was! Like a bird caught in a net . . . A Lost Lady by Willa Cather tells the story of Marian Forrester, a captivating woman who enchants everyone around her—her husband, an elderly railroad pioneer; the small town of Sweet Water; and Niel Herbert, her...

The final novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is a celebration of the American Midwest with Cather's strongest heroine at its heart. Jim and Ántonia meet as children in the wide open plains of Nebraska at the end of the nineteenth century. Jim leaves for college and a career in the east, while Ántonia stays at home, dedicating herself...

The second novel in the Great Plains trilogy, The Song of the Lark is a passionate portrait of the artist as a young woman. Thea Kronberg, a young girl from a small town in Colorado, has a great gift—her beautiful singing voice. Her talent takes her to the great opera houses of Europe, and through ambition and hard work, she...

'A truly remarkable book...Soaked through and through with atmosphere...' New York Times Willa Cather's story of the missionary priest Father Jean Marie Latour and his work of faith in the wilderness of the Southwest is told with a spare but sensuous directness and profound artistry. When Latour arrives in 1851 in the territory of New Mexico, newly acquired by the...

In 1851, Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows—gently—all the while contending...

When the Bergson family leave their home in Sweden to travel to the United States in search of a better life, they, like many immigrants, are awed by the beautiful harshness of their new life in Nebraska. When their father, John Bergson, grows sick and dies, he leaves the farm in the hands of his eldest daughter Alexandra Bergson. Resourceful...

One afternoon in the autumn of 1851, a solitary horseman, followed by a pack-mule, was pushing through an arid stretch of country somewhere in central New Mexico. He had lost his way. Death Comes for the Archbishop is the story of two missionary priests, travelling through the American Southwest in the aftermath of the Mexican American wars. Father Jean-Marie Latour...

Willa Cather's My Ántonia is considered one of the most significant American novels of the twentieth century. Set during the great migration west to settle the plains of the North American continent, the narrative follows Ántonia Shimerda, a pioneer who comes to Nebraska as a child and grows with the country, inspiring a childhood friend, Jim Burden, to write her...

The novel that first made Willa Cather famous—a powerfully mythic tale of the American frontier told through the life of one extraordinary woman. One of America’s greatest writers, Cather established her talent and her reputation with this extraordinary novel—the first of her books set on the Nebraska frontier. A tale of the prairie land encountered by America’s Swedish, Czech, Bohemian,...

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine-stains... And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running. My Antonia (1918) depicts the pioneering period of European settlement on...

The first of Cather's renowned prairie novels, O Pioneers! established a new voice in American literature, turning the stories of ordinary Midwesterners and immigrants into authentic literary characters. O Pioneers! was Willa Cather's first great novel, and to many, it remains her unchallenged masterpiece. No other work of fiction so faithfully conveys both the sharp physical realities and the mythic...

For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Willa Cather's second novel, O Pioneers! (1913) tells the story of Alexandra Bergson and her determination to save her immigrant family's Nebraska farm. Clear-headed...

The spirited daughter of Bohemian immigrants, Antonia must adapt to a hard existence on the desolate prairies of the Midwest. Enduring childhood poverty, teenage seduction, and family tragedy, she eventually becomes a wife and mother on a Nebraska farm. A fictional record of how women helped forge the communities that formed a nation, My Ántonia is also a hauntingly eloquent...

Travel to the Old West with Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather. Willa Cather’s novels brought the life of American settlers on the Great Plains to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness during a time when the lands west of the Mississippi were undergoing rapid transformation. My Ántonia, considered by many scholars to be her first masterpiece, tells the story of...

The first novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is an ode to the American Midwest and the immigrants who transformed it. To the anger of her brothers, it is Alexandra who is entrusted to manage their family farm in the tough, hostile prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, following the death of their father. As the years pass, Alexandra rises heroically...