Franklin Library Willa Cather books:
Willa Cather biography
Willa Sibert Cather (1876-1947), was an American author, born at Winchester, Va. Her parents took her to Nebraska prairies when she was a child. Willa Cather was educated at the University of Nebraska, and after working as a journalist, teacher, and magazine editor, she became a writer of fiction. Her early novels O Pioneers (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Antonia (1918), depict life on the Midwestern Prairies in simple, straightforward manner. The characters in the early novels are notable for their calm resolution and quiet dignity. The prairies also provided the setting for her next three novels. One of Ours (1922) Pulitzer Prize, 1923), A Lost Lady (1923), and the Professor's House (1925). However, the background serves in those novels as a foil for characters of urbanity and intellectual cultivation who find themselves in conflict with the rural Midwestern environment. In Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) Willa Cather deals with the experiences of a Roman Catholic Bishop among the Indians of New Mexico, and in Shadows on the Rock (1931) she describes French Catholic life in 17th-century Quebec.
Characterized by restraint, lucidity, and economy of construction, Willa Catcher's writing amply validates her thesis that fiction should serve as a vehicle for "the full play of emotions". Willa Cather's other works include Obscure Destinies (1931), a collection of three novelettes, and Not Under Forty (1836), a collection of essays
One of Ours
One
of Ours is Willa Cather's 1923 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the
making of an American soldier. Claude Wheeler, the sensitive but
aspiring protagonist, has ready access to his family's fortune but
refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his uncaring father and pious
mother, and rejected by a wife whose only love is missionary work,
Claude is an idealist without ideals to cling to. Only when his country
enters the Great War does he find the meaning of his life.
My Ántonia
My Ántonia is a novel published in 1918 by American writer Willa Cather, considered one of her best works.
The
novel tells the stories of an orphaned boy from Virginia, Jim Burden,
and the elder daughter in a family of Bohemian immigrants, Ántonia
Shimerda, who are each brought as children to be pioneers in Nebraska
towards the end of the 19th century. The first year in the very new
place leaves strong impressions on both children, affecting them for
life.
This novel is considered Cather's first masterpiece. Cather
was praised for bringing the American West to life and making it
personally interesting.
The Troll Garden Short Stories
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 are amply represented
here in the midst of their foibles, grand affairs, and failures, drawn
with great style and subtlety by a writer gathering her formidable
powers. With the psychological precision of her early master Henry James
and the practical wisdom and wit of her contemporary Edith Wharton,
Cather shows us innocents seduced, sophisticates undone, marriages
sundered, idealism compromised, and the rare soul uplifted by art.
Obscure Destinies
The
jacket of the first edition of Obscure Destinies announced “Three New
Stories of the West,” heralding Willa Cather’s return to what many
thought of as “her” territory the Great Plains. These three stories,
“Neighbour Rosicky,” “Old Mrs. Harris,” and “Two Friends,” reflected her
return to the well of memory that had inspired the books that made her
reputation.
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa
Cather's best known novel is an epic almost mythic story of a single
human life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert. 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 with an unforgiving
landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own
loneliness. Out of these events, Cather gives us an indelible vision of
life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.
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