Willa Cather

Marian Forrester arrives in Sweet Water as the treasured bride of a retired builder. To her husband she embodies the idealism of this railroad town on the Western plains. And to Niel Herbert, a smitten local boy, she’s so perfect as to belong to a different world. But as Niel comes of age, the fortunes of Sweet Water decline, and as the promise of the frontier fades, his perception of the fallible woman he has idolized since boyhood is shattered.

Claude Wheeler craves excitement, far more than he can ever find as a farmer's son. He encounters more at university, where the modern world beyond farm life offers new thrills and challenges, only to lose them as the farm calls him back. World War I offers him even more . . . but he may crave excitement more than life itself can allow. Wanting it as much as he does can't protect him from the consequences of personal bravado in an age of killing

Paul had just come in to dress for dinner; he sank into a chair, weak in the knees, and clasped his head in his hands. It was to be worse than jail, even; the tepid waters of Cordelia Street were to close over him finally and forever. The grey monotony stretched before him in hopeless, unrelieved years; Sabbath-school, Young People's Meeting, the yellow-papered room, the damp dish-towels; it all rushed back upon him with sickening vividness.

When high-powered New York attorney Jim Burden recollects his childhood on the Nebraska prairie, Ántonia Shimerda is at the heart of every memory.

Orphaned at age ten, Jim is traveling west to his grandparents’ home in Black Hawk when he first meets Ántonia, the daughter of a Bohemian family who settles on a neighboring farm. Through sunbaked summers and frigid winters, Ántonia bears the hardships