The Great Plains Collection - Three Volumes in One

Willa Cather Cather

Description

It’s nearing the end of the nineteenth century, and prairie life in the Great Plains of America is harsh and unforgiving. Willa Cather’s writing effortlessly captures the hearts and minds of immigrants as they make a new life in the states.

The Great Plains Collection is the complete set of Willa Cather’s masterful trilogy in one volume. At the turn of the twentieth century, European immigrants were settling into North America. Prairie life was a challenge and this collection of books depicts the stories of three characters as they find their footing against the glorious backdrop of Nebraska countryside.

Written between 1913 and 1918, this volume contains the novels:

- O Pioneers!

- The Song of the Lark

- My Ántonia

Follow Cather’s protagonists, Alexandra Bergson, Thea Kronborg, and Jim Burden as they develop successful farmland, become accomplished artists, and find happiness within family life. Featuring strong female protagonists, romance, and truthful accounts of early American life, this collection would make an ideal read for those interested in the history of immigration. This edition contains an introductory excerpt from H. L. Mencken.

Sujets

• Romance historique
• Fiction
• Romance
• American
• Historical

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 26 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528798020
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The Gre at Plains Collection
THREE VOLUMES IN ONE
O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, & My Ántonia
By
WILLA CATHER







Copyright © 2022 Read & Co. Classics
This edition is published by Read & Co. Classics, an imprint of Read & Co.
This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd. For more information visit www.readandcobooks.co.uk


Contents
WI LLA CATHER
An Excerpt by H. L. Mencken
O PIONEERS!
PART I
THE WILD LAND
I
II
III
IV
V
PART II
NEIGHBORING FIELDS
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
PART III
WINTER MEMORIES
I
II
PART IV
THE WHITE MULBERRY TREE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
PART V
ALEXANDRA
I
II
III
THE SONG OF THE LARK
PART I
FRIENDS OF CHILDHOOD
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
PART II
THE SONG OF THE LARK
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
PART III
STUPID FACES
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
PART IV
THE ANCIENT PEOPLE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
PART V
DR ARCHIE'S VENTURE
I
II
III
IV
V
PART VI
KRONBORG TEN YEARS LATER
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
EPILOGUE
MY ÁNTONIA
IN TRODUCTION
PART I
THE SHIMERDAS
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
PART II
THE HIRED GIRLS
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
PART III
LENA LINGARD
I
II
III
IV
PART IV
THE PIONEER WOMAN’S STORY
I
II
III
IV
PART V
CUZAK’S BOYS
I
II
III






WI LLA CATHER
An Excerpt by H. L. Mencken
Four or five years ago, though she already had a couple of good books behind her, Willa Cather was scarcely heard of. When she was mentioned at all, it was as a talented but rather inconsequential imitator of Mrs. Wharton. But today even campus-pump critics are more or less aware of her, and one hears no more gabble about imitations. The plain fact is that she is now discovered to be a novelist of original methods and quite extraordinary capacities—penetrating and accurate in observation, delicate in feeling, brilliant and charming in manner, and full of a high sense of the dignity and importance of her work. Bit by bit, patiently and laboriously, she has mastered the trade of the novelist; in each succeeding book she has shown an unmistakable advance. Now, at last, she has arrived at such a command of all the complex devices and expedients of her art that the use she makes of them is quite concealed. Her style has lost self-consciousness; her grasp of form has become instinctive; her drama is firmly rooted in a sound psychology; her people relate themselves logically to the great race masses that they are parts of. In brief, she knows her business thoroughly, and so one gets out of reading her, not only the facile joy that goes with every good story, but also the vastly higher pleasure that is called forth by first-rate craf tsmanship.
I know of no novel that makes the remote folk of the western farmlands more real than My Antonía makes them, and I know of none that makes them seem better worth knowing. Beneath the tawdry surface of Middle Western barbarism—so suggestive, in more than one way, of the vast, impenetrable barbarism of Russia—she discovers human beings bravely embattled against fate and the gods, and into her picture of their dull, endless struggle she gets a spirit that is genuinely heroic, and a pathos that is genuinely moving. It is not as they see themselves that she depicts them, but as they actually are. And to representation she adds something more—something that is quite beyond the reach, and even beyond the comprehension of the average novelist. Her poor peasants are not simply anonymous and negligible hinds, flung by fortune into lonely, inhospitable wilds. They become symbolical, as, say, Robinson Crusoe is symbolical, or Faust, or Lord Jim. They are actors in a play that is far larger than the scene swept by their own pitiful suffering and aspiration. They are actors in the grand farce that is the trage dy of man.
Setting aside certain early experiments in both prose and verse, Miss Cather began with Alexander’s Bridge in 1912. The book strongly suggested the method and materials of Mrs. Wharton, and so it was inevitably, perhaps, that the author should be plastered with the Wharton label. I myself, ass-like, helped to slap it on—though with prudent reservations, now comforting to contemplate. The defect of the story was one of locale and people: somehow one got the feeling that the author was dealing with both at second-hand, that she knew her characters a bit less intimately than she should have known them. This defect, I venture to guess, did not escape her own eye. At all events, she abandoned New England in her next novel for the Middle West, and particularly for the Middle West of the great immigrations—a region nearer at hand, and infinitely better comprehended. The result was O Pioneers (1913), a book of very fine achievement and of even finer promise. Then came The Song of the Lark (1915)—still more competent, more searching and convincing, better in every way. And then, after three years, came My Antonía, and a sudden leap forward. Here, at last, an absolutely sound technique began to show itself. Here was a novel planned with the utmost skill, and executed in truly admirable fashion. Here, unless I err gravely, was the best piece of fiction ever done by a woman i n America.
I once protested to Miss Cather that her novels came too far apart—that the reading public, constantly under a pressure of new work, had too much chance to forget her. She was greatly astonished. “How could I do any more?” she asked. “I work all the time. It takes three years to write a novel.” The saying somehow clings to me. There is a profound criticism of criticism in it. It throws a bright light upon the difference between such a work as My Antonía and such a work as—. . . . But I have wa rs enough.
An Exc erpt From Wil la Cather Written for the Bor zoi, 1920


O PIONEERS!
First published in 1913


PART I
THE WILD LAND
I
ONE JANUARY DAY, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them. The main street was a deeply rutted road, now frozen hard, which ran from the squat red railway station and the grain “elevator” at the north end of the town to the lumber yard and the horse pond at the south end. On either side of this road straggled two uneven rows of wooden buildings; the general merchandise stores, the two banks, the drug store, the feed store, the saloon, the post-office. The board sidewalks were gray with trampled snow, but at two o'clock in the afternoon the shopkeepers, having come back from dinner, were keeping well behind their frosty windows. The children were all in school, and there was nobody abroad in the streets but a few rough-looking countrymen in coarse overcoats, with their long caps pulled down to their noses. Some of them had brought their wives to town, and now and then a red or a plaid shawl flashed out of one store into the shelter of another. At the hitch-bars along the street a few heavy work-horses, harnessed to farm wagons, shivered under their blankets. About the station everything was quiet, for there would not be another train in un til night.
On the sidewalk in front of one of the stores sat a little Swede boy, crying bitterly. He was about five years old. His black cloth coat was much too big for him and made him look like a little old man. His shrunken brown flannel dress had been washed many times and left a long stretch of stocking between the hem of his skirt and the tops of his clumsy, copper-toed shoes. His cap was pulled down over his ears; his nose and his chubby cheeks were chapped and red with cold. He cried quietly, and the few people who hurried by did not notice him. He was afraid to stop any one, afraid to go into the store and ask for help, so he sat wringing his long sleeves and looking up a telegraph pole beside him, whimpering, “My kitten, oh, my kitten! Her will fweeze!” At the top of the pole crouched a shivering gray kitten, mewing faintly and clinging desperately to the wood with her claws. The boy had been left at the store while his sister went to the doctor's office, and in her absence a dog had chased his kitten up the pole. The little creature had never been so high before, and she was too frightened to move.