Böcker i Willa Cather Scholarly Edition-serien

A novel that describes life on the Nebraska frontier. It presents a range of biographical, historical, and textual information.

Engineer Bartley Alexander appears to have happy life in Boston with a successful career and a beautiful wife. He has been commissioned to design Moorlock Bridge in Canada, the important project of his career. With the onset of middle age, he grows restless, that he reignites love affair with sweetheart of his youth, Irish actress Hilda Borgoyne.

In 1920 Willa Cather collected eight of the stories she had written over the past twenty years into Youth and the Bright Medusa, stories of the perilous pursuit of the bright medusa of art in a hostile, materialistic world. These include some of her best tales.

Willa Cather¿s twelfth and final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, is her most intense fictional engagement with political and personal conflict. Set in Cather¿s Virginia birthplace in 1856, the novel draws on family and local history and the escalating conflicts of the last years of slavery¿conflicts in which Cather¿s family members were deeply involved, both as slave owners and as opponents of slavery. Cather, at five years old, appears as a character in an unprecedented first-person epilogue. Tapping her earliest memories, Cather powerfully and sparely renders a Virginia world that is simultaneously beautiful and, as she said, ¿terrible.¿ The historical essay and explanatory notes explore the novel¿s grounding in family, local, and national history; show how southern cultures continually shaped Cather¿s life and work, culminating with this novel; and trace the progress of Cather¿s research and composition during years of grief and loss that she described as the worst of her life. More early drafts, including manuscript fragments, are available for Sapphira and the Slave Girl than for any other Cather novel, and the revealing textual essay draws on this rich resource to provide new insights into Cather¿s composition process.

Presents a clean, authoritative text of the first edition and charts the subsequent drastic revisions