First published in 1923, A Lost Lady is one of Willa Cather's classic novels about life on the Great Plains. It harks back to Nebraska's early history and contrasts those days with an unsentimental portrait of the materialistic world that supplanted the frontier. In her subtle portrait of Marian Forrester, whose life unfolds in the midst of this disquieting transition, Cather created one of her most memorable and finely drawn characters. This Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of A Lost Lady is edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern...

The scholarly edition of The Professor's House incorporates into its textual analysis findings from a recently discovered and significantly reworked draft of the novel. Willa Cather's perennial claims that there were no extant drafts make this discovery especially important to Cather scholars.

Written in 1925, when she was fifty-two years old, The Professor's House was Cather's seventh novel. Cather explained that in this novel she had attempted two structural experiments. The first experiment she took from the practice of early French and Spanish novelists of inserting a...

Death Comes for the Archbishop sprang from Willa Cather's love for the land and cultures of the American Southwest. Published in 1927 to both praise and perplexity, it has since claimed for itself a major place in twentieth-century literature. When Cather first visited the American Southwest in 1912, she found a new world to imagine and soon came to feel that "the story of the Catholic Church in the Southwest] was the most interesting of all its stories." The narrative follows Bishop Jean Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant, friends since their childhood in France, as they organize the new...

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. The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition presents for the first time the three stories in their historical and biographical context, with an interpretive historical essay and detailed explanatory notes. The textual essay and apparatus...

Although the land on which the Nebraska farm boy Claude Wheeler lives is settled, he himself has inherited the pioneer spirit of adventure, the frontiersman's purpose, and the settler's sense of idealism. In One of Ours, Willa Cather explores the dissonance between Claude's attitudes and his physical reality and studies how this conflict affects him. Drawing on her own family's experience of the war through her cousin G. P. Cather, who fought in World War I, Cather observes how an otherwise misdirected young man could find purpose and meaning in war and how his death would affect his family's...

Before she wrote her prose masterpieces, Willa Cather produced striking poems, which were collected in 1903 in April Twilights. It was her literary debut, preceding the publication of O Pioneers by nine years. In her introduction, distinguished Cather scholar Bernice Slote notes that this early edition of April Twilights restores what had been "an almost lost, certainly blurred, portion of the creative life of a great novelist."

Among the thirty-seven selections are the much-anthologized "Grandmither, Think Not I Forget," and the highly evocative "Prairie Dawn."

Willa Cather said that O Pioneers was her first authentic novel, the first time I walked off on my own feet everything before was half real and half an imitation of writers whom I admired. Cather s novel of life on the Nebraska frontier established her reputation as a writer of great note and marked a significant turningpoint in her artistic development. No longer would she let literary convention guide the form of her writing; the materials themselves would dictate the structure.

The paperback edition contains all the text and scholarly apparatus found in the original Willa Cather...

Hailed by reviewers and readers for its originality, vitality, and truth, My Antonia secured Willa Cather s place in the first rank of American writers. Cather drew deeply on her childhood days in frontier Nebraska for her fourth novel, publishedin 1918. Antonia Shimerda is memorable as the warm-hearted daughter of Bohemians who must adapt to a hard life on the desolate prairie. She survives and matures, a pioneer woman made radiant by spirit.

This Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of My Antonia is edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the...

Shadows on the Rock, written after Willa Cather discovered Quebec City during an unplanned stay in 1928, is the second of her "Catholic" historical novels and reflects her fascination with finding a little piece of France in eastern Canada. Set in the late seventeenth century, the novel centers on the activities of the widowed apothecary Euclide Auclair and his young daughter, Cecile. To Auclair's house and shop come trappers, missionaries, craftsmen, the indigent-those seeking cures, a taste of France, or liberation from the corruptions caused there by the excesses of the French court. Set...

Not the least remarkable feature of this collection is the range and variety of forms and subject matter--reviews (of books, plays, operas, concerts, art exhibits, lectures), feature stories, interviews, straight reportage, columns of miscellaneous comment, and travel letters. Seemingly, with no apparent effort Willa Cather could adjust her sights to any assignment and any audience. And if it is astonishing that she could write so much about so many matters at so many levels, it is perhaps even more astonishing that so much of it was so good. Undeniably, however, the chief interest to the...