A luminous collection--with an introduction, notes, chronology, and bibliography--of ten of Willa Cather's short works written from 1900 to 1920.

Willa Cather's My Antonia 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 Antonia Shimerda, a pioneer who comes to Nebraska as a child and grows with the country, inspiring a childhood friend, Jim Burden, to write her life story. The novel is important both for its literary aesthetic and as a portrayal of important aspects of American social ideals and history, particularly the centrality of migration to American culture.

For more than...

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 sweep of the transformation of the American frontier--and the transformation of the people who settled it. Cather's heroine is Alexandra Bergson, who arrives on the...

Beautiful and lyrical, this third novel by Willa Cather follows the life of Thea Kronberg from her childhood in 19th-century Nebraska to her career as a renowned opera singer.

Since the time of its publication in 1915, this novel had captivated readers with its sharp observations, shimmering descriptions, sly humor, and its provocative heroine a feisty young woman who strives to create her own destiny, regardless of social restrictions.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700titles,...

Best known for the distinctive portraits of the people and land of the American West in her prairie novels, Willa Cather is one of the greatest American writers of this century. The fourteen short stories in this richly diverse collection, along with an exemplary introduction by author Cynthia Griffin Wolff, allow for a more complex view of Cather. As a writer she was intrigued by nature's ruthlessness and mankind's limitless potential for brutality and had a passion for the beauty of art. Ranging from the simplicity of Cather's first published story, "Peter" (1892), to the extraordinary...

In this powerful portrait of the self-making of an artist, Willa Cather created one of her most extraordinary heroines. Thea Kronborg, a minister's daughter in a provincial Colorado town, seems destined from childhood for a place in the wider world. But as her path to the world stage leads her ever farther from the humble town she can't forget and from the man she can't afford to love, Thea learns that her exceptional musical talent and fierce ambition are not enough.
It is in the solitude of a tiny rock chamber high in the side of an Arizona cliff--"a cleft in the heart of the...

Sarah Orne Jewett's place in American letters was assured when this acclaimed collection of stories about her native state of Maine was first published in 1896. Her crisp style and skillful observation of people and places gives her work lasting appeal.

This Norton Critical Edition brings to life through Cather's words, and through the words and images of others the uniquely American frontier experience. In inscribing a copy of O Pioneers for a childhood friend, Cather wrote, "In this one I hit the home pasture " "Contexts and Backgrounds" includes a rich selection of autobiographical and biographical remembrances (including three interviews with Cather), literary contexts (by Cather and her contemporaries, Henry James and Sarah Orne Jewett), and writings on the American West (including selected letters that paint a picture of one family's...

Cather's classic story of Alexandra Bergson, a courageous Swedish woman who must assume responsibility for the farm and family after her father's death in 19th-century Nebraska. A Hallmark Hall of Fame television movie starring Jessica Lange and David Strathem, to air on CBS on February 3, 1992.

The reminiscences of a New York lawyer, Jim Burden, about his boyhood in Nebraska, particularly a young Bohemian girl named Antonia Shimerda, are set against the backdrop of the American assimilation of immigrants.