Willa Cather
Early Novels and Stories
The Troll Garden (short stories) • O Pioneers! • The Song of the Lark • My Ántonia • One of Ours
"Willa Cather's early work has been assembled in another of the glorious Library of America volumes, this one beautifully edited and annotated by Sharon O'Brien.... Cather's writing, strong, sensitive, unmannered, crystal clear, is a pleasure to read, or to reread."—Los Angeles Times
Save $35 when you buy all three Cather volumes
"Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet." Willa Cather's remark describes her own reasons for re-creating in her works the Nebraska frontier of her youth. Set on the vast northern Great Plains, where the earth has only recently come beneath the plow, the stories and novels in this Library of America volume partake of an impressive physical space and a uniquely American ethnic. Panoramas of lonely prairie and open sky reflect the heroic aspirations and stoicism of her characters and the rebelliousness of their spirit.
The Troll Garden (1905) was Cather's first book of fiction. It contains seven stories, including the justly famous "Paul's Case," a study of a young man who escapes the world of the ordinary and briefly tastes the life of romance. Also included is "The Sculptor's Funeral," about a world-famous young artist who remains without honor in his native town.
O Pioneers! (1913) is the story of a young Swedish-American girl, Alexandra Bergson, who is left to manage the homestead farm when her father dies. Although she must contend with the shiftlessness of two brothers and the brutal murder of a third, her instinctive identification with the forces of nature helps bring the land to abundant fruition, and she finds her own happiness in a kindred spirit—an engraver, gold prospector, and fellow dreamer.
In her lyrical novel The Song of the Lark (1915), Cather's love of music and theater and her faith in the spiritual influence of the Western landscape find expression in the ardent and talented Thea Kronborg. Moving from Colorado to Chicago to the primitive Southwest, Thea finds her destiny not in romance, but as a great Wagnerian soprano in the Metropolitan Opera. Her success, and that of all Cather's heroines, derives from what the author calls "the naýve, generous country that gave on its joyous force."
ýntonia Shimerda of My Ántonia (1918) is another of Cather's heroic women. Arriving on the Nebraska frontier as part of a family of Bohemian immigrants, she survives both desertion by the father of her child and her own father's suicide. An unselfish nature allows her to undergo years of drudgery and still affirm an enduring passion for life and motherhood. At once austere and exuberant, historical and mythical, this novel celebrates Cather's devotion to Virgil, one of the many classical authors she avidly read and admired.
One of Ours, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, portrays the blighting effects of twentieth-century progress on a free spirit from the American frontier. Claude Wheeler, its hero, is an imaginative, restless young man who leaves his claustrophobic small town to become a soldier in France during World War I. The Old World shows him culture, art, generosity, and appreciation, and also the horror, waste, and tragedy of war.
Sharon O'Brien, volume editor, is James Hope Caldwell Professor of American Cultures and Professor of English at Dickinson College.
Also by Willa Cather:
Later Novels
Stories, Poems, and Other Writings
Save $35 when you buy all three Cather volumes
Also of Interest:
Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels and Stories
Sinclair Lewis: Main Street & Babbitt
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