Willa Cather

The eldest daughter of Bohemian emigrants, fourteen-year-old ntonia Shimerda arrives in Black Hawk, Nebraska, blissfully unaware of the poverty and heartbreak that lie in store for her family. But as one calamity after another befalls the Shimerdas, ntonia finds the strength not merely to survive, but to thrive. Under the watchful eye of Jim Burden, her neighbor and childhood friend, ntonia blossoms into a woman as beautiful, captivating, and resilient as the Great Plains. Told in lush and evocative prose, My ntonia is a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature and a stirring tribute to the homesteaders whose pioneer spirit tamed the American West.

The first novel in Willa Cather's Prairie Trilogy tells the story of the Bergsons, a family of immigrants eking out a hardscrabble life as farmers in Nebraska at the turn of the nineteenth century. Alexandra, the eldest child of Bergson patriarch John, inherits the family farm when her father dies. Left to raise her father's three sons and somehow turn a struggling farm around, Alexandra is tasked with pulling her family up by its bootstraps.

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One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them. The main street was a deeply rutted road, now frozen hard, which ran from the squat red railway station and the grain "elevator" at the north end of the town to the lumber yard and the horse pond at the south end. On either side of this road straggled two uneven rows of wooden buildings; the general merchandise stores, the two banks, the drug store, the feed store, the saloon, the post-office. The board sidewalks were gray with trampled snow, but at two o'clock in the afternoon the shopkeepers, having come back from dinner, were keeping well behind their frosty windows.

The first of her renowned prairie novels--a story that expresses Cather's conviction that "the history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman." When Alexandra Bergson takes over the family farm after her father's death, she falls under the spell of the rich, forbidding Nebraska prairie.

Don Hedger had lived for four years on the top floor of an old house on the south side of Washington Square, and nobody had ever disturbed him. He occupied one big room with no outside exposure except on the north, where he had built in a many-paned studio window that looked upon a court and upon the roofs and walls of other buildings. His room was very cheerless, since he never got a ray of direct sunlight; the south corners were always in shadow. In one of the corners was a clothes closet, built against the partition, in another a wide divan, serving as a seat by day and a bed by night. In the front corner, the one farther from the window, was a sink, and a table with two gas burners where he sometimes cooked his food. There, too, in the perpetual dusk, was the dog's bed, and often a bone or two for his comfort.

Near Rattlesnake Creek, on the side of a little draw stood Canute's shanty. North, east, south, stretched the level Nebraska plain of long rust-red grass that undulated constantly in the wind. To the west the ground was broken and rough, and a narrow strip of timber wound along the turbid, muddy little stream that had scarcely ambition enough to crawl over its black bottom. If it had not been for the few stunted cottonwoods and elms that grew along its banks, Canute would have shot himself years ago. The Norwegians are a timber-loving people, and if there is even a turtle pond with a few plum bushes around it they seem irresistibly drawn toward it. As to the shanty itself, Canute had built it without aid of any kind, for when he first squatted along the banks of Rattlesnake Creek there was not a human being within twenty miles. It was built of logs split in halves, the chinks stopped with mud and plaster. The roof was covered with earth and was supported by one gigantic beam curved in the shape of a round arch. It was almost impossible that any tree had ever grown in that shape. The Norwegians used to say that Canute had taken the log across his knee and bent it into the shape he wished. There were two rooms, or rather there was one room with a partition made of ash saplings interwoven and bound together like big straw basket work. In one corner there was a cook stove, rusted and broken. In the other a bed made of unplaned planks and poles. It was fully eight feet long, and upon it was a heap of dark bed clothing. There was a chair and a bench of colossal proportions. There was an ordinary kitchen cupboard with a few cracked dirty dishes in it, and beside it on a tall box a tin washbasin. Under the bed was a pile of pint flasks, some broken, some whole, all empty.

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First published in 1922, "One of Ours" is Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize winning story of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska native at the turn of the 20th century. Claude is a young man who finds himself conflicted by the constraints of his overly pious mother and the demands that his father's farm places on his education and life. While attending Temple College, a Christian university, Claude befriends Julius Erlich, whose free-thinking family begins to change his perception of the world and his place in it. Abruptly Claude is called away from his education to help his father expand his farming operation. Soon he finds himself married to Enid Royce, a childhood friend. The disappointment of domesticated life and commitments to his family's farm leave Claude with a terrible sense of entrapment in a life of drudgery. When war breaks out in Europe, Claude sees an opportunity to escape and enlists in the U. S. Army. Willa Cather's "One of Ours" is a captivating tale of a changing American frontier at the beginning of the 20th century and the plight of one young man to deal with it. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.

Book Excerpt: ... Oh, I should think that might have been a safe prediction. Another cup, please?""Yes, thank you. But predicting, in the case of boys, is not so easy as you might imagine, Mrs. Alexander. Some get a bad hurt early and lose their courage; and some never get a fair wind. Bartley"--he dropped his chin on the back of his long hand and looked at her admiringly--"Bartley caught the wind early, and it has sung in his sails ever since." Mrs. Alexander sat looking into the fire with intent preoccupation, and Wilson studied her half-averted face. He liked the suggestion of stormy possibilities in the proud curve of her lip and nostril. Without that, he reflected, she would be too cold." I should like to know what he was really like when he was a boy. I don't believe he remembers," she said suddenly. "Won't you smoke, Mr. Wilson?" Wilson lit a cigarette. "No, I don't suppose he does. He was never introspective. He was simply the most tremendous response to stimuli I have ever known. We didn't..

The eldest daughter of Bohemian emigrants, fourteen-year-old ntonia Shimerda arrives in Black Hawk, Nebraska, blissfully unaware of the poverty and heartbreak that lie in store for her family. But as one calamity after another befalls the Shimerdas, ntonia finds the strength not merely to survive, but to thrive. Under the watchful eye of Jim Burden, her neighbor and childhood friend, ntonia blossoms into a woman as beautiful, captivating, and resilient as the Great Plains. Told in lush and evocative prose, My ntonia is a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature and a stirring tribute to the homesteaders whose pioneer spirit tamed the American West.

A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays

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.

Travel to the Old West with Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather. Willa Cather's novels brought the life of American settlers on the Great Plains to the forefront of the nation's consciousness during a time when the lands west of the Mississippi were undergoing rapid transformation. My ntonia, considered by many scholars to be her first masterpiece, tells the story of a young orphan, Jim Burden, who is sent from Virginia to Nebraska, where he grows up with his grandparents on their farm. He becomes friends with ntonia Shimerda, a Bohemian girl who endures her own struggles as she enters adulthood. Rich in themes that will resonate with readers of all backgrounds, My ntonia explores the struggles and triumphs of ordinary people in extraordinary times.