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Zusatztext "To reread Cather is to rediscover an arresting chapter in the national past."— Los Angeles Times "The time will come when she'll be ranked above Hemingway."—Leon Edel Informationen zum Autor Willa Cather (1873–1948) was born in Winchester, Virginia. Her family moved to Nebraska before she was ten. During her teens she learned both Latin and Greek; she graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1895. She then taught high school, worked for the Pittsburgh Leader , and spent a good deal of time traveling. The Troll Garden (1905) was her first volume of short stories, and it was followed by her appointment as associate editor of McClure’s Magazine . She continued in this position for six years, but resigned in 1912 because she felt that the work for the magazine was interfering with her writing. Alexander’s Bridge , a short novel set in Boston, was published in the same year. In O Pioneers! (1913), she turned to her greatest subject, immigrant life on the Nebraska prairies, and established herself as a major American novelist. O Pioneers! was followed by more novels, including My Ántonia (1918), The Professor’s House (1922), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Cather lived in New York for many years, and she was a familiar figure in intellectual and literary circles. The Old Beauty and Others , a collection of short stories, was published posthumously. Marcelle Clements is a novelist and journalist who has contributed articles on culture, the arts, and politics to many national publications. She is the author of two books of nonfiction, The Dog Is Us and The Improvised Woman , and the novels Rock Me and Midsummer . Lan Samantha Chang is the author of the award-winning books Hunger and Inheritence . A 2008 Guggenheim fellow, she lives with her husband and daughter in Iowa City, Iowa, where she is the director of the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her most recent novel is All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost . Klappentext The novel that first made Cather famous--a powerfully mythic tale of the American frontier told through the life of one extraordinary woman--in a handsome new volume. Includes a new Afterword. Revised reissue. Leseprobe Chapter One 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 wor...
