Author

Willa Cather

Portrait of Willa Cather.
Portrait of Willa Cather. Source · Public domain

Frequently Cited

My Ántonia

1918 · Early 20th Century · Novel

My Ántonia is presented as a memoir written by Jim Burden, a successful New York railroad lawyer, about a Bohemian girl he knew in his Nebraska childhood; a brief introduction by an unnamed friend frames his manuscript. Orphaned at ten, Jim travels from Virginia to live with his grandparents on the prairie near the town of Black Hawk.

Death Comes for the Archbishop

1927 · Early 20th Century · Novel

Death Comes for the Archbishop follows Jean Marie Latour and Joseph Vaillant, French missionary priests sent to the newly annexed American Southwest to organize the Catholic Church in New Mexico. Cather shapes the novel less as a conventional plot than as a sequence of remembered journeys, encounters, hardships, and acts of pastoral administration.