The Song of the Lark
Willa Cather, 1915
A Colorado minister's daughter with a voice too big for her town spends twenty years getting out — and finding out what the leaving costs.
Willa Cather
1873–1947
Cather writes about the pull between where you come from and what you want, and she does it without raising her voice. The plains, the small towns, the people who leave and the people who stay: her novels share a plainness and a patience, and a habit of noticing what a place does to a person. Start with The Song of the Lark if you want a long, unhurried portrait of an artist growing up and away, or The Professor’s House if you want something quieter and more inward, a book about looking back and taking stock.
Feels like longing, art and ambition.
Start with The Song of the Lark.
As a girl in Red Cloud, Nebraska, Cather cut her hair short and signed herself 'William' — she had already decided not to be the girl her town expected.
The world is arranged to take your best hour away from you.
There was some power abroad in the world bent upon taking away from her that feeling with which she had come out of the concert hall. Everything seemed to sweep down on her to tear it out from under her cape. If one had that, the world became one’s enemy; people, buildings, wagons, cars, rushed at one to crush it under, to make one let go of it. Thea glared round her at the crowds, the ugly, sprawling streets, the long lines of lights, and she was not crying now. Her eyes were brighter than even Harsanyi had ever seen them. All these things and people were no longer remote and negligible; they had to be met, they were lined up against her, they were there to take something from her. Very well; they should never have it. They might trample her to death, but they should never have it. Books by Willa Cather
The Professor’s House
Willa Cather, 1925
A Midwestern professor looks back on two romances—one of the heart, one of the mind—and wonders which life was really his.
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