Showing results by author "Willa Cather" in All Categories

r 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.

Willa Cather was perhaps most famous for her great novels such as My Antonia and Death Comes to the Archbishop. However, her short stories were enchanting and practical, local and cosmopolitan. Of the great American writers of the early part of the twentieth century she stood alone in her vision. No American writer ever had her breadth of experience and knowledge of people and places, relating to farmers in Nebraska, to barons in New York, and artists in Paris.

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.

A Lost Lady by Willa Cather is the story of Captain Daniel Forrester and his wife Marian who live in the western town of Sweet Water, along the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1920s. Neil Herbert, a boy who grows up in Sweet Water, admires the Captain and his beautiful, vivacious wife, who have the genteel lifestyle of small-town aristocrats and entertain powerful men. As Captain Forrester's fortune and health decline, Neil becomes aware of a different Mrs. Forrester, one who succumbs to alcohol and opportunistic men.

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.

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.

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.

The Bergsons, a Swedish family of settlers in Nebraska, battle drought and other disasters in an effort to establish a foothold in this new land.

In this series we listen to short stories that are NOT by perhaps the most well-known author of this type. But the many other rich talents in the volume may have treated the subject matter a little differently, or were perhaps just overlooked in the stampede to applaud the winner, but these authors are of equal merit.

Willa Cather was an American author who grew up in Nebraska. She is best known for her depictions of frontier life on the Great Plains. This collection was published in 1905. Although it is Cather's first collection of short stories, it contains some of her best-known work. All of the stories center around art and artists.

First published in 1918, My Antonia is the final book of Willa Cather’s "prairie trilogy" of novels, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. This is a coming-of-age story about the orphaned boy Jim Burden growing up on his grandparents' farm in Nebraska and his lifelong friendship with Ántonia Shimerda, the eldest daughter of an immigrant family from Bohemia.

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 story was first published in McClure's Magazine in 1905. Harvey Merrick, a famous sculptor, died of tuberculosis at the age of 40. As the story begins, a group of townsfolk waits for the arrival of the night train that is bringing his body back from the East for burial in the small Kansas town where he grew up. Only one man, however, understands what Harvey has accomplished since leaving their town. The rest of the town folk seem close minded and provincial.

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.

"Paul's Case" was first published in 1905 in Willa Cather's first collection, The Troll Garden, which began her literary career. When the story was printed in McClure's magazine in May of the same year, it brought Cather to national attention. In 1920 the story was reprinted by Alfred Knopf in Youth and the Bright Medusa. "Paul's Case" examines the dangers of art and the struggles of youthful artists in a commercial world.

The story of a man who does not want to leave his old study for a new house.

These stories are a unique, early study of celebrity and the vast emotional and social divisions of class and power that still exist today. Each story introduces a woman of power and the men who struggle to define them and thus themselves.

Seen through the eyes of a French Catholic missionary, Death Comes for the Archbishop is a tale about the development of the 19th-century American Southwest as the Indians and Spanish deal with each other and the arriving Americans.

A beautiful Christmas story of love, forgiveness and uneasy life. Set in Chicago on a bitterly cold Christmas night. William considers stealing both to satisfy his hunger and to find excitement in his dull life, but when a woman drops a parcel, he gives it to her instead of running off with it. He feels as if he is a failed thief, in the same manner as he has failed at everything - college, journalism, real estate, performing.

The inevitable is understood by each and every one of us who faces the final calling. So too are the effects on those left behind. The memories are there but the empty space, the void can never be refilled. It remains a dark, unreliable pit of loneliness. The sadness and often depression, the lack of will to continue may swamp us all. Unquenchable, undeniable. But loss can, after mourning, give the opportunity to reappraise the lost and how we can each move forward. In the literary world an accessible balance can be given.