The Song of the Lark

The second novel in Willa Cather's acclaimed Great Plains Trilogy, published for the first time by Vintage Classics with beautiful jackets.

Willa Cather makes a world which is burningly alive, sometimes lovely, often tragic

The Song of the Lark illuminates all her work

Willa Cather was a Pulitzer prize-winning American writer, best known for her novels of Nebraskan frontier life. Born in 1873 near Winchester, Virginia, she moved with her family to Catherton, Nebraska in 1883, and the landscape went on to have a formative effect on her. Before becoming a full-time writer, Cather worked as a journalist, a magazine editor and a teacher. 
 
 
Her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, was published in 1912, followed by titles including O Pioneers! (1913); The Song of the Lark (1915); My Ántonia (1918); One of Ours (1922), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize; Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). She died in New York in 1947.

The second novel in Willa Cather’s Great Plains trilogy, is a lyrical coming-of-age story charting the struggles of an artists life. 
 
 'Lingers long in the memory' Joyce Carol Oates 
 
 Thea Kronberg, gifted with a beautiful voice, defies her humble beginnings in Colorado and finds success far from her small hometown. But her achievements come with painful drawbacks. As the distance between Thea and her roots increases, she must fight to find her inner strength and reach her full potential. 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PENELOPE LIVELY

My Ántonia

Willa Cather’s best-loved novel and a beautiful portrayal of frontier life in Nebraska is published for the first time by Vintage Classics, with a new introduction by travel writer Sara Wheeler.

A clear-eyed salute to the resilience of the human spirit

The knowledge of long hardship gives weight to the novel’s exquisitely realized moments of fulfilment… Cather looks with a wise, clear eye on those quiet moments

Willa Cather’s best-loved novel, and the final book in the Great Plains trilogy, is a beautiful portrayal of friendship, longing and growing up in frontier Nebraska. 
 
 When young orphan Jim Burden is sent to live with his grandparents in Nebraska, he finds himself growing up alongside Bohemian immigrant Ántonia Shimerda. Their childhoods are full of shared adventures but as they grow their paths diverge, spurred on by the dire poverty of the Shimerda family. Yet Jim will never forget Ántonia, spellbound by her strength and remarkable free spirit. 
 
 WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY TRAVEL WRITER SARA WHEELER

Death Comes for the Archbishop

A moving testament to friendship, published for the first time by Vintage Classics as part of our Willa Cather series.

Its whole effect works slowly and mysteriously ... a major, and rare, artistic achievement

Quite simply a masterpiece . . . I am completely bowled over by it; by the power of its writing, by the vividness of its scene painting and by the stories it tells...This is a book which I go on rereading.

A portrait of an enduring friendship, from one of America’s most celebrated novelists. 
 
‘Quite simply a masterpiece’ Daily Telegraph 
 
 Two priests are despatched from Rome to New Mexico to reinvigorate Catholicism among the locals, knowing little of the challenges that await them. Over almost four decades they encounter a rich variety of people, from rebellious Mexican priests to steadfast Native Americans uninterested in changing their longstanding customs. 
 
‘Its whole effect works slowly and mysteriously ... a major, and rare, artistic achievement’ AS Byatt

One of the warmest, most quietly rousing books that I know; a clear-eyed salute to the resilience of the human spirit and the innate hardiness of the immigrants who came across the ocean to start afresh in the golden west

No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia

Cather was the first great American novelist to make the West - the real West, not the stuff of pulp fiction - her theme. She makes you see, smell, and feel the prairie

Willa Cather was born in Virginia in 1873 and moved to Nebraska, with its wide open plains and immigrant farming communities, at the age of nine. This landscape would deeply affect her later writing. She attended university and became a journalist and teacher in Pittsburgh, and then a magazine editor in New York. Her first major novel, O Pioneers!, appeared in 1913 and was followed by two more in her prairie trilogy, The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia, as well as her masterpiece Death Comes for the Archbishop. She lived with the editor Edith Lewis for thirty-nine years until her death in 1947.

The final novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is a celebration of the American midwest with Cather's strongest heroine at its heart 
 
Jim and Ántonia meets as children in the wide open plains of Nebraska at the end of the nineteenth century. Jim leaves for college and a career in the east, while Ántonia stays at home, dedicating herself to her farm and family. As the years roll by, Jim will come to view Ántonia as the embodiment of the prairie itself - tough, spirited and enduring, despite the hardness and loneliness of pioneer life. Willa Cather's beautiful novel is a celebration of the Nebraskan prairie she loved she much, and a powerful depiction of a pivotal era in the making of America.

The second novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is a passionate portrait of the artist as a young woman 
 
Thea Kronberg, a young girl from a small town in Colorado has a great gift - her beautiful singing voice. Her talent takes her to the great opera houses of Europe, and through ambition and hard work, she forges a life as an artist. But if she can never go home again, nor can she leave behind her past. At last, in a desert canyon in Arizona, Thea has a revelation that will allow her to attain a new state of spirituality and become a truly great artist. 
 
'Willa Cather makes a world which is burningly alive, sometimes lovely, often tragic' Helen Dunmore 
 
'The Song of the Lark illuminates all her work' A. S. Byatt 
 
'Lingers long in the memory' Joyce Carol Oates

O Pioneers!

Her voice, laconical and richly sensuous, sings out with a note of unequivocal love for the people she is setting down on the page

The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us

Takes a knife and stabs you through the heart, by its joining of such ravishment with such pessimism

The first novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is an ode to the American Midwest and the immigrants who transformed it 
 
To the anger of her brothers, it is Alexandra who is entrusted to manage their family farm in the tough, hostile prairie of Hanover, Nebraska following the death of their father. As the years pass, Alexandra rises heroically to the challenge, finding strength in the savage beauty of the land even as loneliness and personal tragedies crowd in. A rapturous work of understated lyricism, Willa Cather's 1913 tale of a pioneer woman who tames the wild, hostile lands of the Nebraskan prairie is also the story of what it means to be American.

Willa Cather

Willa Cather's first Great Plains novel, is at once a love letter to Nebraska and the tale of a remarkable heroine who remains resilient in the face of tragedy. 
 
 ‘She is undoubtedly one of the greatest American writers’ Observer 
 
 Alexandra Bergson inherits the family farm when her father dies early. In spite of her brothers’ doubts, her ambitious vision for the land comes to fruition, but the price of success appears to be a small, quiet life. Then the equilibrium of country life is jeopardised by the return of Alexandra’s brother Emil and her childhood confidant, Carl Linstrum.

Willa Cather

O Pioneers!

Summary

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