Willa Cather

My Ántonia, first published 1918, is one of Willa Cather's greatest works. It is the last novel in the Prairie trilogy, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. My Ántonia tells the stories of several immigrant families who move out to rural Nebraska to start new lives in America, with a particular focus on a Bohemian family, the Shimerdas, whose eldest daughter is named Ántonia. The book's narrator,

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O pioneers!: When Alexandra Bergson's father dies, she is left in charge of his unsuccessful farm and her younger brothers. The unyielding land of the Nebraska Divide would be challenge enough, but a violent passion shakes this courageous young woman to her core and changes her life forever. Song of the lark: Thea Kronborg, an ambitious young singer, has to contend with the narrow-mindedness of her neighbors in a tiny Colorado town. Alexander's...

My Antonia tells the stories of several immigrant families who move out to rural Nebraska to start new lives in America, with a particular focus on a Bohemian family, the Shimerdas, whose eldest daughter is named Antonia. The book's narrator, Jim Burden, arrives in the fictional town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, on the same train as the Shimerdas, as he goes to live with his grandparents after his parents have died. Jim develops strong feelings for Antonia,...

A collection of three novellas honoring the settlers of the American plains.

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...

Presented are ten classic tales by four of America's most honored female authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.