
Later Novels: A Lost Lady / The Professor’s House / Death Comes for the Archbishop / Shadows on the Rock / Lucy Gayheart / Sapphira and the Slave Girl
by Willa Cather
About this book
This Library of America volume collects six novels by Willa Cather, who is among the most accomplished American writers of the twentieth century. Their formal perfection and expansiveness of feeling are an expression of Cather’s dedication both to art and to the open spaces of America.A Lost Lady (1923) exemplifies her principle of conciseness. It concerns a woman of uncommon loveliness and grace who lends an aura of sophistication to a frontier town, and explores the hidden passions and desires that confine those who idealize her. The recurrent conflict in Cather’s work between frontier culture and an encroaching commercialism is nowhere more powerfully articulated.The Professor’s House (1925) encapsulates a story within a story. In the framing narrative, Professor St. Peter, a prizewinning historian of the early Spanish explorers, finds himself disillusioned with family, career, even the house that reflects his success. Within this story is another, of St. Peter’s friend Tom Outland, whose brief but adventurous life still shadows those he loved.Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) tells the story of the first bishop of New Mexico in a series of tableaux modeled on the medieval lives of the saints. Cather affectionately portrays the refined French Bishop Latour and his more earthy assistant within the harsh and beautiful landscape of the Southwest and among the Mexicans, Indians, and settlers they were sent to serve.Shadows on the Rock (1931), though its setting and subject are unusual for Cather, expresses her fascination with the “curious endurance of a kind of culture, narrow but definite.” It is a re-creation of 17th-century Québec as it appears to the apothecary Auclaire and his daughter Cécile: the town’s narrow streets, the supply ships on its great river, its merchants, profligates, explorers, missionaries, and towering personalities like Frontenac and Laval, all parts of a colony struggling to survive.Lucy Gayheart (1935) returns to the themes of Cather’s earlier writings, in a more somber key. Talented, spontaneous, and eager to explore the possibilities of life, Lucy leaves her prairie home to pursue a career in music. After a happy interval, her life takes an increasingly disastrous turn.Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) marks a triumphant conclusion to Cather’s career as a novelist. Set in Virginia five years before the Civil War, the story shows the effects of slaveholding on Sapphira Colbert, a woman of spirit and common sense who is frighteningly capricious in dealing with people she “owns,” and on her husband, who hates slavery even while he conforms to the social order that permits it. When through kindness he refuses to sell a slave, Sapphira’s jealous reaction precipitates a sequence of events that registers a conflict of cultural as well as personal values.
Where to buy
No purchase options available at this time.
More by Willa Cather

50 Masterpieces you have to read before you die vol: 1
Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Oscar Wilde, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Anne Brontë, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, Victor Hugo, D.H. Lawrence, Emily Brontë, Henry James, Alexandre Dumas, Bram Stoker, E.E. Cummings, Daniel Defoe, Honoré de Balzac, Charlotte Brontë, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Peter Straub, Francis Stevens, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Marion Crawford, Willa Cather, H.P. Lovecraft, Washington Irving, August Derleth, Ambrose Bierce, Gertrude Atherton, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charles Brockden Brown, Herman Melville, Robert Bloch, Stephen Crane, Sarah Orne Jewett, Bret Harte, Kate Chopin, Stephen Vincent Benét, Ellen Gholson Glasgow, Seabury Quinn, John Kendrick Bangs, Fitz-James O'Brien, Conrad Aiken, Julian Hawthorne, Lafcadio Hearn, W.C. Morrow, Robert W. Chambers, David H. Keller, Ralph Adams Cram, Frank Norris, Alice Brown, Edward Lucas White, Madeline Yale Wynne, Emma Frances Dawson, Henry S. Whitehead, Olivia Howard Dunbar, Harriet Prescott Spofford

Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present
Emily Dickinson, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, Willa Cather, Christina Rossetti, Virginia Woolf, Rita Mae Brown, Anaïs Nin, Sigmund Freud, Katherine Mansfield, Carson McCullers, Sarah Orne Jewett, Jewelle Gomez, Charles Baudelaire, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Djuna Barnes, William Cullen Bryant, Vita Sackville-West, Audre Lorde, Gertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall, Henry Handel Richardson, Helen R. Hull, Amy Lowell, Katherine Bradley, Maria Edgeworth, Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry Fielding, Michel de Montaigne, Charlotte Mew, H.D., Angelina Weld Grimké, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Colette, Katharine Lee Bates, Aphra Behn, Lillian Faderman, Charlotte Charke, Clemence Dane, Renée Vivien, Anne Lister, William Rounseville Alger, Rose O'Neill, Anna Seward, Katherine Philips, Edith Cooper, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Marie Madeleine, Eleanor Butler, Sarah Ponsonby

Coming, Aphrodite! and Other Stories
Willa Cather