Cather is as good as any novelist the United States has produced, and this statement is likely to remain true.ĭeath Comes for the Archbishop, loosely based on the lives of two actual young French priests who came to New Mexico in the mid 19 th century, is haunting at many levels. Grad students or close followers of literature may take on the task of producing a better grouping of four novels by an American author, and may succeed, but only by invoking taste. The simple case is that fours books – Death Comes for the Archbishop, Song of the Lark, One of Ours and My Ántonia - are equal in quality and significance to the four best books of any U.S. (My runner-up is Steinbeck, but that’s a topic for another day.) I’d like to make a simple case for Cather as the leading American novelist, however meritorious others may be. Her work is more read in high schools than colleges, while Cather’s personal life – irrelevant to her art – gets attention denied her novels owing to the sexual politics that mesmerize the lit world. Yet Cather has been undervalued in the postwar period. There is an argument Willa Cather is comfortably among the best novelists, that the great American novel need no longer be sought because Ántonia is already that book. She died in 1947 in New York City.An old Burlington rail car in a prairie museum.

About the Author WILLA CATHER, author of twelve novels, including O Pioneers!, My ntonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop, was born in Virginia in 1873 but grew up in Nebraska, where many of her novels are set. In prose as shimmering and piercingly true as the light in a desert canyon, Cather takes us into the heart of a woman coming to know her deepest self. Here she finds the courage to seize her future and to use her gifts to catch the shining, elusive element that is life itself-life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose. It is in the solitude of a tiny rock chamber high in the side of an Arizona cliff-a cleft in the heart of the world-that Thea comes face to face with her own dreams and desires, stripped clean by the haunting purity of the ruined cliff dwellings and inspired by the whisperings of their ancient dust. But as her path to the world stage leads her ever farther from the humble town she cant forget and from the man she cant afford to love, Thea learns that her exceptional musical talent and fierce ambition are not enough. Thea Kronborg, a ministers daughter in a provincial Colorado town, seems destined from childhood for a place in the wider world. Book Synopsis In this powerful portrait of the self-making of an artist, Willa Cather created one of her most extraordinary heroines.

The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather