A Lost Lady is the portrait of a frontier woman who reflects the conventions of her age even as she defies them. 

To the people of Sweet Water, a fading railroad town on the Western plains, Mrs. Forrester is the resident aristocrat, at once gracious and comfortably remote. To her aging husband she is a treasure whose value increases as his powers fail. To Niel Herbert, who falls in love with her as a boy and becomes her confidant as a man, Mrs. Forrester is by turns steadfast and faithless, dazzling and pathetic: a woman whose charm is intertwined with a terrifying vulnerability.

To the people of Sweet Water, a fading railroad town on the Western plains, Mrs. Forrester is the resident aristocrat, at once gracious and comfortably remote.

To her aging husband she is a treasure whose value increases as his powers fail.

To Niel Herbert, who falls in love with her as a boy and becomes her confidant as a man, Mrs. Forrester is by turns steadfast and faithless, dazzling and pathetic.

Mrs. Forrester is a woman whose charm is intertwined with a terrifying vulnerability, and whose inevitable decline with age is symbolic of the West itself and its fall from the idealized age of noble pioneers to the age of capitalist exploitation, and A Lost Lady is the portrait of a frontier woman who reflects the conventions of her age even as she defies them.

There is a pleasure in listening to the imagery of Alexander’s Bridge that is similar to viewing a beautiful watercolor, as in the following description of a Boston street in late afternoon: “The sun sank rapidly; the silvery light had faded from the bare boughs and the watery twilight was setting in when Wilson at last walked down the hill, descending into cooler and cooler depths of grayish shadow.”

Against this delicate imagery, Willa Cather renders the tough inner terrain of a man in mid-life crisis. Bartley Alexander is a master bridge engineer. At forty-three he is at the height of his power, comfortable with success and all it brings. Yet he yearns for the lost vibrancy of his youth. He leads a double life, veering between his beautiful, accomplished wife and his mistress, an actress he knew as a student in Paris. This conflict creates a crack in the structure of his life which ultimately undermines him.

From one of the most highly acclaimed novelists of the twentieth century—”a truly remarkable book” (The New York Times), 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.

In 1851, Father Jean Marie Latour becomes the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. While the area is American by law, it’s still Mexican and Indian by custom and belief. During the years that follow, Latour tirelessly but gently spreads his faith while facing external and internal obstacles. Loosely based on the life of Jean-Baptiste Lamy and the construction of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, this novel chronicles the events that occur after the capture of the southwest by American forces during the Mexican-American war.

In this haunting 1935 novel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of My Ántonia performs crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction: the impermanence of innocence, the opposition between prairie and city, provincial American values and world culture, and the grandeur, elation, and heartache that await a gifted young woman who leaves her small Nebraska town to pursue a life in art.

At the age of eighteen, Lucy Gayheart heads for Chicago to study music. She is beautiful and impressionable and ardent, and these qualities attract the attention of Clement Sebastian, an aging but charismatic singer who exercises all the tragic, sinister fascination of a man who has renounced life only to turn back to seize it one last time. Out of their doomed love affair—and Lucy’s fatal estrangement from her origins—Willa Cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a Schubert sonata.

After the death of his parents, Jim Burden is sent to live with his grandparents on the Nebraska plains. By chance, on that same train is Aacute;ntonia, a bright-eyed girl who will become his neighbor and lifelong friend. Her family has emigrated from Bohemia to start a new life farming but soon lose their money and must work hard just to survive. Through it all, Aacute;ntonia retains her natural pride and free spirit.
Jim’s grandparents have a large and tidy farm. They are kind to him, but conventional. Later, Jim becomes a scholar and Aacute;ntonia becomes a “hired girl” in town. She blossoms in the new freedom that town life offers. Jim can only taste this life vicariously through her recounting of town gossip and of the “dance tent.” Aacute;ntonia’s strong will, spirit, and honesty allow her to thrive in the midst of hardship.
In My Aacute;ntonia, Willa Cather paints a rich picture of life on the prairie at the beginning of the twentieth century and depicts some of the many cultures that came to compose the United States.

After the death of his parents, Jim was sent to live with his grandparents in Black Hawk Nebraska. There he befriended Antonia, the daughter of Bohemian immigrants. Years later, Jim, now a successful lawyer in New York, returns to his childhood home and Antonia. Jim’s love for Antonia has endured, much as she herself has endured tragic circumstances.

Antonia Shimerdas moves to the harsh Nebraska heartland with her impoverished Bohemian family when she is still a girl. For young Jim Burden, who lives with his grandparents on a homestead nearby, Antonia is an embodiment of the female pioneer-self-sufficient, vigorous, and determined to withstand the daily challenges of maintaining home and family in a primitive countryside. When Jim grows up, his memories return to Antonia. In his effort to understand what she meant to him, he creates an enduring picture of the American frontier and of a woman of unusual spirit.

Widely recognized as Willa Cather’s finest book and one of the outstanding novels of American literature, My Ántonia tells of the life of early American pioneers in Nebraska.

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, Ántonia’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 Ántonia.

Infused with a gracious passion for the land, My Ántonia is a deeply moving portrait of an entire community and its way of life.

Myra Henshawe gave up her uncle’s fortune for love. Having eloped with her husband, they embarked on a journey that can only be deemed as ordinary. As their lives play out, Myra begins to regret the decisions she had made in life, leading their marriage–and her health–to its demise. In this thought-provoking novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather paints a picture of American normalcy riddled with life’s regrets and scorned love.

First published in 1926, this book is Willa Cather’s sparest and most dramatic novel, a dark and prescient portrait of a marriage that subverts our oldest notions about the nature of domestic happiness.

As a young woman, Myra Henshawe gave up a fortune to marry for love–a boldly romantic gesture that became a legend in her family. But this worldly, sarcastic, and perhaps even wicked woman may have been made for something greater than love. In her portrait of Myra and in her exquisitely nuanced depiction of her marriage, Cather shows the evolution of a human spirit as it comes to bridle against the constraints of ordinary happiness and seek an otherwordly fulfillment. My Mortal Enemy is a work whose drama and intensely moral imagination make it unforgettable.

“The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman,” writes Willa Cather in O Pioneers! The country is America; the woman is Alexandra Bergson, a fiercely independent young Swedish immigrant girl who inherits her father’s farm in Nebraska. A model of emotional strength, courage, and resolve, Alexandra fights long and hard to transform her father’s patch of raw, wind-blasted prairie into a highly profitable business.
A gripping saga of love, murder, greed, failure, and triumph, O Pioneers! vividly portrays the hardships of prairie life. Above all, it champions the belief that hard work is the surest road to personal fulfillment. Described upon publication in the New York Times as “American in the best sense of the word,” O Pioneers! celebrates the men and women who struggled to build a nation that is both compelling and contradictory.

Alexandra Bergsons, the daughter of Swedish immigrants, inherits her family’s ailing farm in Hanover, Nebraska upon the death of her father. Over the years, she turns the farm into a successful enterprise. However, success has not brought peace, as passion and love intervene.

This powerful early Cather novel, a landmark of American fiction, tells the story of the young Alexandra Bergson, whose dying father leaves her in charge of the family and of the Nebraska lands they have struggled to farm. In Alexandra’s lifelong fight to survive and succeed, Cather relates an important chapter in the history of the American frontier, evoking the harsh grandeur of the prairie, and comparing with keen insight the experiences of Swedish, French and Bohemian immigrants in the United States.

O Pioneers! is a story of the immigrants who came to America to build new lives for themselves. Struggling against poverty, ignorance, drought, and storm, they came to love and understand the land, until it rewarded them with a richness exceeding all imaginings.

The Bergsons are a family of strong-willed Swedish immigrants who have come to make a living on the great prairie. When the father, John, dies, worn out by disease and debt, his eldest daughter, Alexandra, becomes the head of the family. This is the story of her love affair with the land—an American Midwest that is vast and golden.

Life on the divide was a struggle for the pioneering Bergson family. Alexandra, both 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 the landscape and the enduring desire to achieve a dream.

A Nebraska native, Claude Wheeler wants to attend the State University but instead lives a typical college life as a Temple College student. However, when his successful father decides to expand the family farm, Claude’s reality is changed forever as he’s forced to drop out to help realize his father’s dream. Later, as war wages on in Europe, he enlists, hoping to escape his dreary fate and find purpose.

Willa Cather’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel tells of the making of a young American soldier.

Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly 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 the purpose he has been searching for all his life. His yearnings impel him toward a frontier wilder and more violent than the one tamed by his pioneer ancestors.

One of Ours is a canny and vital portrait of an American psyche at once skeptical and romantic, restless and heroic.

“Superbly written, with that sensitivity to sunset and afterglow that has always been Miss Cather’s.”
—The New York Times

Willa Cather wrote Shadows on the Rock immediately after her historical masterpiece, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Like its predecessor, this novel of seventeenth-century Quebec is a luminous evocation of North American origins, and of the men and women who struggled to adapt to that new world even as they clung to the artifacts and manners of one they left behind.

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 twelve-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. As Cather follows this devout and resourceful child over the course of a year, she re-creates the continent as it must have appeared to its first European inhabitants. And she gives us a spellbinding work of historical fiction in which great events occur first as rumors and then as legends—and in which even the most intimate domestic scenes are suffused with a sense of wonder.

Originally published in a 1896 edition of The Home Monthly, The Burglar’s Christmas tells the story Crawford, a homeless man in Chicago who has not eaten recently and considers stealing food on Christmas Eve. Reminiscent of The Parable of the Prodigal Son, this tale reflects on the nature of forgiveness. This recording of The Burglar’s Christmas was recorded as part of Dreamscape’s Classic Christmas Stories: A Collection of Timeless Holiday Tales.

A lyrical and bittersweet novel of a middle-aged man losing control of his life that’s a brilliant study in emotional dislocation and renewal—from one of the most highly acclaimed authors of the twentieth century.

Professor Godfrey St. Peter is a man in his fifties who has devoted his life to his work, his wife, his garden, and his daughters, and achieved success with all of them. But when St. Peter is called on to move to a new, more comfortable house, something in him rebels. And although at first that rebellion consists of nothing more than mild resistance to his family’s wishes, it imperceptibly comes to encompass the entire order of his life. The Professor’s House combines a delightful grasp of the social and domestic rituals of a Midwestern university town in the 1920s with profound spiritual and psychological introspection.

After studying piano as a child, Thea Kronborg leaves her family and their frontier town of Moonstone, Colorado to pursue music in Chicago. There, her instructor insists that her singing voice is her greater gift, and she begins to work on mastering her craft. Seeking to become one of the world’s greatest opera singers, she embarks on a journey of self-discovery and fulfillment that takes her across the world. Written in 1915 and featuring lyrical and authentic insights about life on the frontier, this book is the second in Willa Cather’s Prairie Trilogy, following O Pioneers! and preceding My Antonia.

Thea Kronberg has a voice that can call down angels and the soul of a Colorado pioneer girl. But as she develops her talents and devotes herself to the life of an artist, she must consider the cost of the creative path she follows. Willa Cather’s classic novel is full of the breathtaking beauty of the American frontier and the spirit of the people who live there.

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. The novel follows Thea’s growth from provincial midwesterner to acclaimed international opera singer. 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.

In this semiautobiographical portrait of a young artist in the making, Willa Cather takes us into the heart of a woman coming to know her deepest self. Thea Kronborg, a minister’s daughter in a provincial Colorado town, has dreams and gifts that her humble hometown will not satisfy. With the support of a few allies who recognize her rare qualities, she follows her ambitions to the big city, determined to be an opera diva. As she moves through a series of music teachers in Chicago, Thea finds that the attitudes and standards of those around her rarely match her own. It is only when she reconnects with pure nature in a brilliant Arizona desert canyon that Thea rediscovers the sensuous, mystical openness that is the source of her art. Realizing she must protect this experience at all costs, she resolves to shed all relationships that don’t serve her higher purpose.