Publisher's Synopsis
In this haunting novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop performs a series of 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. Willa Cather is among the most eminent female American authors. She is known for her depictions of U.S. prairie life in novels like O Pioneers, My Antonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Cather was born in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley but her family relocated to Nebraska in 1883 and she spent the rest of her childhood in Red Cloud, Nebraska. She insisted on attending college, so her family borrowed money so she could enrol at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. While there she became a regular contributor to the Nebraska State Journal. After failing to obtain a position at UNL, she moved to Pennsylvania, where she taught high school and worked for Home Monthly and McClure's Magazine. The latter publication serialized her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, which was heavily influenced by Henry James. For her novels she returned to the prairie for inspiration, and these works became popular and critical successes. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours (1922).