ISBN10: 0940450712, ISBN13: 9780940450714, [publisher: Library of America, New York] Hardcover Hardcover. Willa cather, one of the great American novelists of this century, also wrote some of America's best short fiction, as evidenced in this volume. From her haunting first story, "Peter," the tale of a Bohemian immigrant who brought his violin to the raw western frontier, to her posthumously published "The Best Years," the stories included here span the fifty years of Cather's writing life. In these tales of pioneers and farmers, artists and youthful lovers, immigrants and their striving children, she creates both a new, never-surpassed portrait of the land and people of the American West and a lively and contemporary picture of life in eastern cities.Many of Cather's finest stories, among them "Coming, Aphrodite!" - a New York tale of passion and ambition - and the subtly constructed "Old Mrs. Harris," are unfamiliar to most readers. Her earliest, uncollected stories are suffused in memories of prairie childhood. "On the Divide," "The Enchanted Bluff," "Eric Hermannson's Soul," and others contain many of the themes of her later work, evoking the loneliness and hardship as well as the beauty and challenge of pioneer life "on the bright edges of the world." In the stories of "Youth and the Bright Medusa" (1920) which includes "The Sculptor's ...

Willa Cather, one of the great American novelists of the 20th century, also wrote some of America's best short fiction. From her haunting first story, "Peter," the tale of a Bohemian immigrant who brought his violin to the raw western frontier, to her posthumously published "The Best Years," the stories included here span the fifty years of Cather's writing life. In these tales of pioneers and farmers, artists and youthful lovers, immigrants and their striving children, she creates both a new, never-surpassed portrait of the land and people of the American West and a lively and contemporary picture of life in eastern cities. ISBN 0940450712 9780940450714 [US]