Books with author Willa Sibert Cather

My Ántonia is one of eight classic American novels featured in the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read initiative, designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. The Big Read provides citizens with the opportunity to read and discuss a single book within their communities and is supported by expansive outreach and publicity campaigns. Over one hundred communities will participate in 2007, each with a program lasting approximately one month. A kick-off event is followed by panel discussions, film screenings, and lectures or public readings devoted to the book. Willa Cather’s heartfelt novel is the unforgettable story of an immigrant woman’s life on the hardscrabble Nebraska plains. Through Jim Burden’s affectionate reminiscence of his childhood friend, the free-spirited Ántonia Shimerda, a larger, uniquely American portrait emerges, both of a community struggling with unforgiving terrain and of a woman who, amid great hardship, stands as a timeless inspiration.

Willa Cather's best known novel is an epic--almost mythic--story of a single human life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert. In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows--gently, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Out of these events, Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.

My Ántonia was enthusiastically received in 1918 when it was first published. It was considered a masterpiece and placed Cather in the forefront of women novelists. Today, it is considered as her first masterpiece. Cather was praised for bringing the American West to life and making it personally interesting. It brought place forward almost as if it were one of the characters, while at the same time playing upon the universality of the emotions, which in turn promoted regional American literature as a valid part of mainstream literature. While interpretations vary, My Ántonia is clearly an elegy[citation needed] to those families who built new lives west of the Mississippi River and highlights the role of women pioneers in particular. Cather also makes a number of comments concerning her views on women's rights and there are many disguised sexual metaphors in the text.

Set in the mid-19th century. At the center of the novel are two French Jesuits - Bishop Jean Marie Latour and his friend Father Joseph Vaillant - two celibate men who devote their lives to bring religious faith and comfort to Mexican-Americans in the newly acquired U.S. territory of New Mexico. Cather presents them as strong, committed men, willing to put up with great hardships in doing what they saw as God’s work and sharing their faith. Flawed, like all of us are, but good at heart.This captivating narrative celebrates the natural beauty of New Mexico and the importance of the adventures of these two French Catholic missionaries in contributing to the social and spiritual life of the area in a meaningful way. Often considered Cather's masterpiece...

Willa Cather's lyrical and bittersweet novel of a middle-aged man losing control of his life is a brilliant study in emotional dislocation and renewal. Professor Godfrey St. Peter is a man in his fifties who has devoted his life to his work, his wife, his garden, and his daughters, and achieved success with all of them. But when St. Peter is called on to move to a new, more comfortable house, something in him rebels. And although at first that rebellion consists of nothing more than mild resistance to his family's wishes, it imperceptibly comes to encompass the entire order of his life. The Professor's House combines a delightful grasp of the social and domestic rituals of a Midwestern university town in the 1920s with profound spiritual and psychological introspection.