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  • Published: 15 August 2012
  • ISBN: 9781612191058
  • Imprint: Melville House
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $24.99

Alexander's Bridge




Willa Cather's first novel

The characteristic themes of Cather’s mature work are already present in her debut novella, an evocation of a tragic love triangle.
 
Bartley Alexander, renowned engineer of bridges, is a man with a past who “looked as a tamer of rivers ought to look.” Discovered by his mentor “sowing wild oats in London,” he returned to America and the commission that made his name. Now, married to his wife of ten years, a chance encounter with actress Hilda Burgoyne, an almost forgotten love from his past, prompts a doomed attempt to recapture the boundlessness of his youth.

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  • Published: 15 August 2012
  • ISBN: 9781612191058
  • Imprint: Melville House
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Willa Cather

Willa Cather was a Pulitzer prize-winning American writer, best known for her novels of Nebraskan frontier life. Born in 1873 near Winchester, Virginia, she moved with her family to Catherton, Nebraska in 1883, and the landscape went on to have a formative effect on her. Before becoming a full-time writer, Cather worked as a journalist, a magazine editor and a teacher.


Her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, was published in 1912, followed by titles including O Pioneers! (1913); The Song of the Lark (1915); My Ántonia (1918); One of Ours (1922), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize; Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). She died in New York in 1947.

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Praise for Alexander's Bridge

"[Cather] gives a very good account of herself indeed. She writes carefully, skillfully, artistically. Her dialogue has life in it and gets her story ahead. Her occasional paragraphs of description are full of feeling and color."
--H.L. Menken
"When it at last moves into its true theme, the mortal division in a man's nature, it gathers an intensity and power which comes from some deeper level of feeling ... It is as if her true voice, submerged before in conventional speech, had broken through, and were speaking in irrepressible accents of passion and authority." --Edith Lewis, Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record
"She wrote twelve novels, most of them about the great subject of early-twentieth-century literature--the gulf between the mind and the world ...Cather could never be mistaken for a nineteenth-century writer: her austere style is part of modernist classicism, her tragic vision part of modernist pessimism." -- Joan Acocella, The New Yorker