Works by
Willa Cather
(Writer)
[1873 - 1947]

Collections

• Willa Cather: Early Stories and Novels (1987), Sharon O'Brien, ed.
  "Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet." Willa Cather's remark describes her own reasons for re-creating in her powerful fiction the Nebraska frontier of her youth. The vast Great Plains, where the earth has only recently come beneath the plow and the sky is huge and open, mirrors the uniquely American ethic of her characters: their heroic aspirations and stoicism, their passion for creativity, their rebelliousness of spirit. This volume, the first in The Library of America's authoritative three-volume collected Cather, includes the story collection "The Troll Garden," her first work of fiction, along with the beloved novels "O Pioneers!," "The Song of the Lark," "My Antonia," and "One of Ours," which earned a Pulitzer Prize.

• After the World Broke in Two: The Later Novels of Willa Cather (1990) by Merrill Maguire Skaggs

• Willa Cather: Later Novels (1990), Sharon O'Brien, ed.
  The six works in this volume--"A Lost Lady," "The Professor's House," "Death Comes for the Archbishop," "Shadows on the Rock," "Lucy Gayheart," and "Sapphira and the Slave Girl"--are at once intensely lyrical and highly controlled. Their fascination with the American Southwest, early Canada and Catholicism reflects the older Cather's search for alternatives to the grasping civilization she felt was increasingly replacing the spirit of the early pioneers. validation-form-field.keypoints: The Library of America is an award-winning, nonprofit program dedicated to publishing America's best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes, featuring authoritative texts. Hailed as "the most important book-publishing project in the nation's history" (Newsweek), this acclaimed series is restoring America's literary heritage in "the finest-looking, longest-lasting edition ever made" (New Republic).

• Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, and Other Writings (1992), Sharon O'Brien, ed.
  Featuring her wonderfully readable and often anthologized short stories, the third and final volume (with "Early Novels and Stories" and "Later Novels") of the most comprehensive Cather edition available anywhere. Includes the short-story collections "Youth and the Bright Medusa," "Obscure Destinies," and "The Old Beauty and Others," the novellas "Alexander's Bridge" and "My Mortal Enemy," occasional pieces, critical essays, and Cather's only book of poetry.

• Three Novels (1998), Maureen Howard, ed.
  My Antonia, O Pioneers!, and the Song of the Lark

Fiction

• Alexander's Bridge (1912)
  Construction engineer Bartley Alexander is a troubled, middle-aged man torn between his cold American wife and an alluring mistress in London who has helped him recapture his youth and sense of freedom. A fascinating study of a man's growing awareness of the breach in his integrity, this book is essential reading for fans of this great American novelist.

• O Pioneers! (1913)
  The land belongs to the future... that's the way it seems to me....I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it -- for a little while."

  O Pioneers! (1913) 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 wind-blasted prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, as a girl and grows up to make it a prosperous farm. But this archetypal success story is darkened by loss, and Alexandra's devotion to the land may come at the cost of love itself.

  At once a sophisticated pastoral and a prototype for later feminist novels, O Pioneers! is a work in which triumph is inextricably enmeshed with tragedy, a story of people who do not claim a land so much as they submit to it and, in the process, become greater than they were.

• The Song of the Lark (1915)
  Perhaps Willa Cather's most autobiographical work, The Song of the Lark charts the story of a young woman's awakening as an artist against the backdrop of the western landscape. Thea Kronborg, an aspiring singer, struggles to escape from the confines her small Colorado town to the world of possibility in the Metropolitan Opera House. In classic Cather style, The Song of the Lark is the beautiful, unforgettable story of American determination and its inextricable connection to the land.

• My Antonia (1918)
  In Willa Cather's own estimation, My Antonia, first published in 1918, was "the best thing I've ever done." An enduring paperback bestseller on Houghton Mifflin's literary list, this hauntingly eloquent classic now boasts a new foreword by Kathleen Norris, Cather's soulmate of the plains. Infused with a gracious passion for the land, My Antonia embraces its uncommon subject - the hardscrabble life of the pioneer woman on the prairie - with poetic certitude, rendering a deeply moving portrait of an entire community. Through Jim Burden's endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature's most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memories of a fateful sleigh ride, Antonia's desperately homesick father and self-indulgent mother, and the coy Lena Lingard. Holding the pastoral society's heart, of course, is the bewitching, free-spirited Antonia Shimerda.

• One of Ours (1922)
  Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative of the making of a young American soldier
  
  Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully modulated novel, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.
  
  In One of Ours Willa Cather explores the destiny of a grandchild of the pioneers, a young Nebraskan whose yearnings impel him toward a frontier bloodier and more distant than the one that vanished before his birth. In doing so, she creates a canny and extraordinarily vital portrait of an American psyche at once skeptical and romantic, restless and heroic.

• A Lost Lady (1923)
  Marian Forrester is the symbolic flower of the Old American West. She draws her strength from that solid foundation, bringing delight and beauty to her elderly husband, to the small town of Sweet Water where they live, to the prairie land itself, and to the young narrator of her story, Neil Herbert. All are bewitched by her brilliance and grace, and all are ultimately betrayed. For Marian longs for "life on any terms", and in fulfilling herself, she loses all she loved and all who loved her. This, Willa Cather's most perfect novel, is not only a portrait of a troubling beauty, but also a haunting evocation of a noble age slipping irrevocably into the past.

• The Professor's House (1925)
  A study in emotional dislocation and renewal--Professor Godfrey St. Peter, a man in his 50's, has achieved what would seem to be remarkable success. When called on to move to a more comfortable home, something in him rebels.

• My Mortal Enemy (1926)
  This book is Cather's sparest and most dramatic novel, a dark and oddly prescient portrait of a marriage that subverts our oldest notions about the nature of happiness and the sanctity of the hearth.

• Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
  Willa Cather's best known novel; a narrative that recounts a life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert.

• Shadows on the Rock (1931)
  Willa Cather wrote "Shadows on the Rock" immediately after her other historical masterpiece, "Death Comes for the Archbishop." Like its predecessor, this novel of seventeenth-century Quebec is a luminous evocation of North American origins, and of the men and women who struggled to adapt to that new world even as they clung to the artifacts and manners of the one they left behind.
  
  In 1697, Quebec is an island of French civilization perched on a bare gray rock amid a wilderness of trackless forests. For many of its settlers, Quebec is a place of exile, so remote that an entire winter passes without a word from home. But to twelve-year-old Cecile Auclair, the rock is home, where even the formidable Governor Frontenac entertains children in his palace and beavers lie beside the lambs in a Christmas creche. As Cather follows this devout and resourceful child over the course of a year, she re-creates the continent as it must have appeared to its first European inhabitants. And she gives us a spellbinding work of historical fiction in which great events occur first as rumors and then as legends--and in which even the most intimate domestic scenes are suffused with a sense of wonder.

• Lucy Gayheart (1935)
  Lucy Gayheart is eighteen years old, a tempermental young lady, rife with charm and vitality, and a good pianist. She wanted to escape life in the little town of Haverford and went to Chicago to study music. But she was not born to be an artist, as she lacks will and discipline. This bitter awareness is like a shot, when she hears the opera singer Sebastian singing for the first time. It is an encounter that will change her future life in a fateful way.

• Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940)
  Sapphira Dodderidge, a Virginia lady of the 19th century, marries beneath her and becomes irrationally jealous of Nancy, a beautiful slave. One of Cather's later works.

Non-fiction

• The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1909) with Georgine Milmine

• Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing As an Art (1949)
  "Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there-that, one might say, is created." This famous observation appears in Willa Cather on Writing, a collection of essays and letters first published in 1949. In the course of it Cather writes, with grace and piercing clarity, about her own fiction and that of Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, and Katherine Mansfield, among others. She concludes, "Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all-no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself-a game of make-believe, of re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it."

Poetry

• April Twilights and Other Poems (1969)

See also:

• Lives of Notable Gay Men and Lesbians: Willa Cather) (1988) by Sharon O'Brien

• Great Short Stories by American Women (1996), Candace Ward, ed.
  Choice collection of 13 stories includes "Life in the Iron Mills" by Rebecca Harding Davis, Zora Neale Hurston's "Sweat," plus superb fiction by Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, many others.

• Willa Cather (1999) BY  Marilee Lindemann
  Although it has been proven posthumously by scholars that Willa Cather had lesbian relationships, she did not openly celebrate lesbian desire, and even today is sometimes described as homophobic and misogynistic. What, then, can a reassessment of this contentious first lady of American letters add to an understanding of the gay identities that have emerged in America over the past century? As Marilee Lindemann shows in this study of the novelist's life and work, Cather's sexual coming-of-age occurred at a time when a cultural transition was recasting love between women as sexual deviance rather than romantic friendship. At the same time, the very identity of "America" was characterized by great instability as the United States emerged as a modern industrial nation and imperial power. Indeed, both terms, "queer" and "America," achieved fresh ideological potency at the turn of the century. Willa Cather: Queering America is an enlightening unpacking of Cather's writings, from her controversial love letters of the 1890s--in which "queer" is employed to denote sexual deviance--to her epic novels, short stories, and critical writings. Lindemann points to the "queer" qualities of Cather's fiction--rebellion against traditional fictional form, with sometimes unlikable characters, lack of emphasis on heroic action, and lack of engagement in the drama of heterosexual desire.

• Willa Cather's Sexual Aesthetics and the Male Homosexual Literary Tradition (1999) by John P. Anders
  In this first full-length study of male homosexuality in Cather's short stories and novels, John P. Anders examines patterns of male friendship ranging on a continuum from the social to the sexual. He argues that Cather worked in the familiar tradition of friendship literature inspired by classical and Christian texts and also borrowed from a homosexual legacy that is part of, yet distinct from, established literary traditions. In combining these two traditions Cather gave her fiction an unexpected depth and complexity.

• Willa Cather and Others (2001) by Jonathan Goldberg
  After many years as one of the premier scholars of English Renaissance literature, Jonathan Goldberg turns his attention to the work of American novelist Willa Cather. With a focus on Cather’s artistic principle of “the thing not named,” Willa Cather and Others illuminates the contradictions and complexities inherent in notions of identity and shows how her fiction transforms the very categories—regarding gender, sexuality, race, and class—around which most recent Cather scholarship has focused. The “others” referred to in the title are women, for the most part Cather’s contemporaries, whose artistic projects allow for points of comparison with Cather. They include the Wagnerian diva Olive Fremstad, renowned for her category-defying voice; Blair Niles, an ethnographer and novelist of jazz-age Harlem and the prisons of New Guinea; Laura Gilpin, photographer of the American Southwest; and Pat Barker, whose Regeneration trilogy places World War I writers—and questions of sexuality and gender—at its center. In the process of studying these women and their work, Goldberg forms innovative new insights into a wide range of Cather’s celebrated works, from O Pioneers! and My Ántonia to her later books The Song of the Lark, One of Ours, The Professor’s House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl.

  By applying his unique talent to the study of Cather’s literary genius, Jonathan Goldberg makes a significant and new contribution to the study of American literature and queer studies.

• Willa Cather and Material Culture: Real-World Writing, Writing The Real World (2005), Janis P. Stout. ed.
  Willa Cather and Material Culture is a collection of 11 new essays that tap into a recent and resurgent interest among Cather scholars in addressing her work and her career through the lens of cultural studies. One of the volume's primary purposes is to correct the commonplace view of her as a literary connoisseur set apart from her times and to demonstrate the extent to which Cather did participate in her culture.
  
  The contributors explore both the objects among which Cather lived and the objects that appear in her writings, as well as the commercial constraints of the publishing industry in which her art was made and marketed. Essays address her relationship to quilts both personally and as symbols in her work; her contributions to domestic magazines such as Home Monthly and Woman's Home Companion; the problematic nature of Hollywood productions of her work; and her efforts and successes as a businesswoman. By establishing the centrality of material matters to her writing, these essays contribute to the reclaiming of Cather as a modernist and highlight the significance of material culture, in general, to the study of American literature.

• Women-Writing-Women: Three American responses to the Woman Question (Kate Chopin, Nella Larsen, Willa Cather) (2006) by Theresa Defrancis
  The Woman Question served as a catalyst in Kate Chopin's, Nella Larsen's, and Willa Cather's portrayal of the eroticized female body. The question evolved, in part, from Herbert Spencer's 1873 article “Psychology of the Sexes” and centered around Spencer's “theories” on woman's nature, her function, and her differences—biological, sexological, and sociological—from man. Chapter one historicizes the Woman Question by examining its influence in these three areas. The sciences, however, did not hold a monopoly on the debate. Rather, the question elicited reactions from many arenas—popular newspapers and magazines, literature, political cartoons, public policy—and in different forms—articles, music, caricatures, legislature. Throughout the decades of the question's popularity, open and subtle responses appeared. The aforementioned authors responded subtly. These women may not pointedly, purposely, or specifically integrate the Woman Question within their fiction; nevertheless, their literature contains an indirect reaction to the question and its aftermath through its portrayal of the female characters' sexuality. While other scholars have investigated the Woman Question through literature, ironically the focus tends to be on male authors' treatment of the debate. Also, British rather than American authors—both male and female—received more attention. An interrogation of American women's novels of the period adds scope and depth to the debate by broadening the perspective to include a segment heretofore marginalized: the American woman writer/character. All three authors examine woman's desire for personal independence enacted through her own sexuality, but each comes at this from a different perspective. Chapters two, three, and four analyze one novel by each author. Chopin's The Awakening introduces the literary study because it operates as a transitional text challenging the Cult of True Womanhood while simultaneously introducing the sexualized New Woman. In Larsen's Quicksand, the New Woman is conceptualized within a black female body, a body that boldly confronts racist notions of woman. Likewise, Cather questions heteropatriarchal hegemony through her eroticized, femininized landscape in O Pioneers! Although each author develops her heroine differently, all three construct strong female characters who energize the Woman Question debate, forcing a re-examination of it in ways ignored or unrealized before.