A Lost Lady

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 
 
How light and alive she was! Like a bird caught in a net . . . 
 
Marian Forrester enchants everyone around her: her husband, an elderly railroad pioneer; the small town of Sweet Water; and Niel Herbert, her unwavering confidant. Yet, her irresistible charm and dazzling wit conceal a dangerous vulnerability – and her greatest secret. A significant inspiration for The Great Gatsby, this exquisite novella is a poignant elegy for a bygone era, fading into history.

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 Ántonia, 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.

How light and alive she was! Like a bird caught in a net . . . 
 
Marian Forrester enchants everyone around her: her husband, an elderly railroad pioneer; the small town of Sweet Water; and Niel Herbert, her unwavering confidant. Yet, her irresistible charm and dazzling wit conceal a dangerous vulnerability – and her greatest secret. A significant inspiration for The Great Gatsby, this exquisite novella is a poignant elegy for a bygone era, fading into history.

O Pioneers!

The first novel in Willa Cather's acclaimed Great Plains Trilogy, published for the first time by Vintage Classics with beautiful jackets.

Willa Cather was a Pulitzer prize-winning American writer, best known for her novels of Nebraskan frontier life. Born in 1873 near Winchester, Virginia, she moved with her family to Catherton, Nebraska in 1883, and the landscape went on to have a formative effect on her. Before becoming a full-time writer, Cather worked as a journalist, a magazine editor and a teacher. 
 
 
Her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, was published in 1912, followed by titles including O Pioneers! (1913); The Song of the Lark (1915); My Ántonia (1918); One of Ours (1922), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize; Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). She died in New York in 1947.

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. In spite of her brothers’ doubts, her ambitious vision for the land comes to fruition, but the price of success appears to be a small, quiet life. Then the equilibrium of country life is jeopardised by the return of Alexandra’s brother Emil and her childhood confidant, Carl Linstrum.

The Song of the Lark

The second novel in Willa Cather's acclaimed Great Plains Trilogy, published for the first time by Vintage Classics with beautiful jackets.

Willa Cather makes a world which is burningly alive, sometimes lovely, often tragic

The Song of the Lark illuminates all her work

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. But her achievements come with painful drawbacks. As the distance between Thea and her roots increases, she must fight to find her inner strength and reach her full potential. 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PENELOPE LIVELY

My Ántonia

Willa Cather’s best-loved novel and a beautiful portrayal of frontier life in Nebraska is published for the first time by Vintage Classics, with a new introduction by travel writer Sara Wheeler.

A clear-eyed salute to the resilience of the human spirit

The knowledge of long hardship gives weight to the novel’s exquisitely realized moments of fulfilment… Cather looks with a wise, clear eye on those quiet moments

Willa Cather’s best-loved novel, and the final book in the Great Plains trilogy, is a beautiful portrayal of friendship, longing and growing up in frontier Nebraska. 
 
 When young orphan Jim Burden is sent to live with his grandparents in Nebraska, he finds himself growing up alongside Bohemian immigrant Ántonia Shimerda. Their childhoods are full of shared adventures but as they grow their paths diverge, spurred on by the dire poverty of the Shimerda family. Yet Jim will never forget Ántonia, spellbound by her strength and remarkable free spirit. 
 
 WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY TRAVEL WRITER SARA WHEELER

Death Comes for the Archbishop

A moving testament to friendship, published for the first time by Vintage Classics as part of our Willa Cather series.

Its whole effect works slowly and mysteriously ... a major, and rare, artistic achievement

Quite simply a masterpiece . . . I am completely bowled over by it; by the power of its writing, by the vividness of its scene painting and by the stories it tells...This is a book which I go on rereading.

A portrait of an enduring friendship, from one of America’s most celebrated novelists. 
 
‘Quite simply a masterpiece’ Daily Telegraph 
 
 Two priests are despatched from Rome to New Mexico to reinvigorate Catholicism among the locals, knowing little of the challenges that await them. Over almost four decades they encounter a rich variety of people, from rebellious Mexican priests to steadfast Native Americans uninterested in changing their longstanding customs. 
 
‘Its whole effect works slowly and mysteriously ... a major, and rare, artistic achievement’ AS Byatt

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The final novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is a celebration of the American midwest with Cather's strongest heroine at its heart 
 
Jim and Ántonia meets as children in the wide open plains of Nebraska at the end of the nineteenth century. Jim leaves for college and a career in the east, while Ántonia stays at home, dedicating herself to her farm and family. As the years roll by, Jim will come to view Ántonia as the embodiment of the prairie itself - tough, spirited and enduring, despite the hardness and loneliness of pioneer life. Willa Cather's beautiful novel is a celebration of the Nebraskan prairie she loved she much, and a powerful depiction of a pivotal era in the making of America.

One of the warmest, most quietly rousing books that I know; a clear-eyed salute to the resilience of the human spirit and the innate hardiness of the immigrants who came across the ocean to start afresh in the golden west

No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia

Cather was the first great American novelist to make the West - the real West, not the stuff of pulp fiction - her theme. She makes you see, smell, and feel the prairie

Jim and Ántonia meets as children in the wide open plains of Nebraska at the end of the nineteenth century. Jim leaves for college and a career in the east, while Ántonia stays at home, dedicating herself to her farm and family. As the years roll by, Jim will come to view Ántonia as the embodiment of the prairie itself - tough, spirited and enduring, despite the hardness and loneliness of pioneer life. Willa Cather's beautiful novel is a celebration of the Nebraskan prairie she loved she much, and a powerful depiction of a pivotal era in the making of America.

Willa Cather

Nicholas Gaskill

Quite simply a masterpiece . . . I am completely bowled over by it; by the power of its writing, by the vividness of its scene painting and by the stories it tells . . . This is a book which I go on rereading.

The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us.

A powerful piece of writing, rich with the essence of a poor but beautiful country and a simple yet dignified people.

When Latour arrives in 1851 in the territory of New Mexico, newly acquired by the United States, he finds a vast desert region of red hills and tortured arroyos that is American by law but Mexican and Indigenous in custom and belief. Over the next four decades, Latour works gently and tirelessly to spread his faith and to build a soaring cathedral out of the local golden rock–while contending with unforgiving terrain, derelict and sometimes rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. 
 
Death Comes for the Archbishop shares a limitless, craggy beauty with the New Mexico landscape of desert, mountain, and canyon in which its central action takes place, and its evocations of that landscape and those who are drawn to it suggest why Cather is acknowledged without question as the most poetically exact chronicler of the American frontier.

Death Comes For The Archbishop

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Praise for Death Comes For The Archbishop

Quite simply a masterpiece . . . I am completely bowled over by it; by the power of its writing, by the vividness of its scene painting and by the stories it tells . . . This is a book which I go on rereading.

The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us.

A powerful piece of writing, rich with the essence of a poor but beautiful country and a simple yet dignified people.

Quite simply a masterpiece . . . I am completely bowled over by it; by the power of its writing, by the vividness of its scene painting and by the stories it tells . . . This is a book which I go on rereading.

The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us.

A powerful piece of writing, rich with the essence of a poor but beautiful country and a simple yet dignified people.

Quite simply a masterpiece . . . I am completely bowled over by it; by the power of its writing, by the vividness of its scene painting and by the stories it tells . . . This is a book which I go on rereading.

The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us.

A powerful piece of writing, rich with the essence of a poor but beautiful country and a simple yet dignified people.

Books by Willa Cather

Series by Willa Cather

Great Plains Trilogy

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