Böcker av Willa Cather

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.

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.

Alexandra Bergson anländer till den blåsiga prärien i Nebraska. Här lever hon tillsammans med de andra nybyggarna, och skapar med tiden en välmående gård. Men vägen till framgång är inte enkel för en ung kvinna. Hennes resa är fylld av förlust och sorg, och i slutändan riskerar den hängivenhet hon har till landskapet att kosta henne det största av allt – kärleken. "Hell, Banbrytare!" är den första romanen av Willa Cather, och oftast sedd som hennes främsta verk. Det är en levande skildring av ett förändrande landskap, och om de människor som bosatte sig där och bidrog till förändringen.Willa Cather (1873-1947) var en amerikansk författare. Hon växte upp i Nebraska med en far som var nybyggare. Hennes romaner skildrar främst nybyggarna på Nebraskas prärie, oftast med fokus på kvinnorna.

"The best thing I''ve done is My Antonia," recalled Willa Cather. "I feel I''ve made a contribution to American letters with that book."Ántonia Shimerda returns to Black Hawk, Nebraska, to make a fresh start after eloping with a railway conductor following the tragic death of her father. Accustomed to living in a sod house and toiling alongside the men in the fields, she is unprepared for the lecherous reaction her lush sensuality provokes when she moves to the city. Despite betrayal and crushing opposition, Ántonia steadfastly pursues her quest for happiness—a moving struggle that mirrors the quiet drama of the American landscape.

In this powerful portrait of the self-making of an artist, Willa Cather created one of her most extraordinary heroines. Thea Kronborg, a minister''s daughter in a provincial Colorado town, seems destined from childhood for a place in the wider world. But as her path to the world stage leads her ever farther from the humble town she can''t forget and from the man she can''t afford to love, Thea learns that her exceptional musical talent and fierce ambition are not enough.  It is in the solitude of a tiny rock chamber high in the side of an Arizona cliff--"a cleft in the heart of the world"--that Thea comes face to face with her own dreams and desires, stripped clean by the haunting purity of the ruined cliff dwellings and inspired by the whisperings of their ancient dust. Here she finds the courage to seize her future and to use her gifts to catch "the shining, elusive element that is life itself--life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose." In prose as shimmering and piercingly true as the light in a desert canyon, Cather takes us into the heart of a woman coming to know her deepest self.

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 ¿ntonia, 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.

One of America's greatest women writers, Willa Cather established her talent and her reputation with this extraordinary novel—the first of her books set on the Nebraska frontier. A tale of the prairie land encountered by America's Swedish, Czech, Bohemian, and French immigrants, as well as a story of how the land challenged them, changed them, and, in some cases, defeated them, Cather's novel is a uniquely American epic. Alexandra Bergson, a young Swedish immigrant girl who inherits her father's farm and must transform it from raw prairie into a prosperous enterprise, is the first of Cather's great heroines—all of them women of strong will and an even stronger desire to overcome adversity and succeed. But the wild land itself is an equally important character in Cather's books, and her descriptions of it are so evocative, lush, and moving that they provoked writer Rebecca West to say of her: "The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us.”Willa Cather, perhaps more than any other American writer, was able to re-create the real drama of the pioneers, capturing for later generations a time, a place, and a spirit that has become part of our national heritage.

Willa Cather's My Antonia is considered one of the most significant American novels of the twentieth century. The novel is important both for its literary aesthetic and as a portrayal of important aspects of American social ideals and history, particularly the centrality of migration to American culture. This Broadview edition includes a rich selection of primary source materials.

The seven stories in this volume were written during the ascending and perhaps most triumphant years of Willa Cather's career, the period during which she published nine books, including My Antonia, A Lost Lady, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. For the most part ironic in tone, these stories are bound by the geometrics of urban life.

Willa Cather's masterful 1913 novel marks her return to the Nebraska of her youth, and to the stories of the immigrant settlers she had known during her childhood and teenage years in Red Cloud.

Special Large Print edition, with easy to read text, of Willa Cather's classic work.