This volume contains four great works (O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, My Ántonia, and One of Ours) by the author who created the first autonomous and successful women's heroes in American literature. Willa Cather is one of America's most treasured writers. Her childhood in the woodlands of Virginia and on the prairies of Nebraska formed the inspiration for many of her novels, and her devotion to education provided the basis for her lifetime of achievement. Many critics have stated that Cather might have won a Nobel Prize had she not been a woman in a time of gender inequality.“The time will come when she'll be ranked above Hemingway."—Leon Edel“The thing about Willa Cather's landscape and figures is that not only were they born alive but remain so after six decades." —GuardianThe Song of the Lark (1915): “A story of something better than suggestiveness and charm—a thing finished, sound, and noble." —The NationMy...

Willa Cather's novel of seventeenth-century Quebec is a luminous evocation of North American origins, and of the men and women who struggled to adapt to a new world even as they clung to the artifacts and manners of 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 Cécile 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 créche. 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...

In this haunting 1935 novel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of My Ántonia performs crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction: the impermanence of innocence, the opposition between prairie and city, provincial American values and world culture, and the grandeur, elation, and heartache that await a gifted young woman who leaves her small Nebraska town to pursue a life in art.At the age of eighteen, Lucy Gayheart heads for Chicago to study music. She is beautiful and impressionable and ardent, and these qualities attract the attention of Clement Sebastian, an aging but charismatic singer who exercises all the tragic, sinister fascination of a man who has renounced life only to turn back to seize it one last time. Out of their doomed love affair—and Lucy's fatal estrangement from her origins—Willa Cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a Schubert sonata.

A literary event: the first publication of one of America's most consistently admired and studied writers.Willa Cather, wanting only her work to speak for her, clearly forbade the publication of her letters in her will. But now, over sixty-five years after her death, her literary reputation as secure as a reputation can be, the letters have become available for publication. Here then are 564 letters, nearly 20 percent of the entire cache, from the funny reports of 1880s Red Cloud life she wrote as a teenager, through her college years at the University of Nebraska, her time as a journalist, then novelist, in Pittsburgh and New York, to the letters of the 1940s when she despaired of her aging body and the events of WWII. The voice is strikingly consistent with the voice of her fiction: confident, elegant, detailed, open-hearted, concerned with profound ideas, but at the same time unfiltered, full of small fibs, emotional outbursts, inconsistencies, and the joys and...