The novel follows life of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska native, searching for his purpose in life. We see Claude building friendships during his University years and these relationships interrupted when his father expands the family farm and Claude is obligated to leave university and operate part of the family farm. Once pinned to the farm, Claude marries Enid Royce, a childhood friend. His notions of love and marriage are quickly devastated. Finally we see Claude believing he has found a purpose in life beyond the drudgery of farming and marriage.

ONE summer evening in the year 1848 three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome. The villa was famous for the fine view from its terrace. The hidden garden in which the four men sat at table lay some twenty feet below the south end of this terrace, and was a mere shelf of rock, overhanging a steep declivity planted with vineyards. A flight of stone steps connected it with the promenade above. The table stood in a sanded square, among potted orange and oleander trees, shaded by spreading ilex oaks that grew out of the rocks overhead. Beyond the balustrade was the drop into the air, and far below the landscape stretched soft and undulating; there was nothing to arrest the eye until it reached Rome itself.

Willa Cather based "Death Comes for the Archbishop" on William Howlett’s account of the life of Father Macheboeuf, vicar to Archbishop Lamy of New Mexico. Set in the mid-nineteenth century, the book follows the fortunes of Father Latour and his assistant and friend, Father Vaillant, as they organize the disjointed religious structure of the southwestern missions. The two face a formidable task, made more difficult by powerful priests long in control of the area who are loathe to abandon the corruption into which they have fallen. Working together diligently and with an unshakable faith, Father Latour and Father Vaillant eventually reclaim the region and bring its far-flung communities under the guidance of a single diocese.First published in 1927, "Death Comes for the Archbishop" is the book that Cather believed to be her finest work. Like "The Professor’s House," it is a novel that explores the life of a man and draws on the American Southwest for its setting. Here the similarity ends, however, as the tone of the two books is quite different.Unlike the earlier books, this one celebrates the life choices of its central characters, finding in the lives of Father Joseph Vaillant and Father Jean Marie Latour a simple dignity and extraordinary fulfillment.

Canada, 1697. Québec è la principale città della colonia francese, per molti è un luogo in cui cominciare una nuova vita, ma per Cécile Auclair, figlia dodicenne del farmacista Euclide, quel luogo è casa.Quando inizia l'inverno, le navi francesi fanno rotta verso la patria, lasciando Québec resta isolata dal resto del mondo, nell'attesa che la primavera porti di nuovo la vita."Ombre sulla rocca" racconta un anno di vita di Cécile, di suo padre, e dell'umanità che abita la rocca canadese.Un romanzo delicato e potente, un omaggio alle origini dell'America del Nord e ai pionieri che lasciarono tutto alle spalle per fondare il Nuovo Mondo.

Un anziano contadino che, dall'Est Europa, arriva ad avere una terra tutta sua negli Stati Uniti; una nonna sradicata dalla sua terra d'origine e costretta a preoccuparsi del futuro della figlia e della nipote; una coppia di amici il cui rapporto è logorato dalle diverse posizioni politiche.Tre storie di vite ordinarie che si riscattano nel momento di andare incontro al destino, tre vicende accomunate dalla volontà di cercare la bellezza in circostanze e luoghi apparentemente banali.Un'opera che mette ancora una volta in risalto la grande capacità di introspezione e la potenza delle scrittura di Willa Cather, premio Pulitzer nel 1923.

Death Comes for the Archbishop is a 1927 novel by American author Willa Cather. It concerns the attempts of a Catholic bishop and a priest to establish a diocese in New Mexico Territory.The narrative is based on two historical figures of the late 19th century, Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Projectus Machebeuf, and rather than any one singular plot, is the stylized re-telling of their lives serving as Roman Catholic clergy in New Mexico. Willa Sibert Cather (born Wilella Sibert Cather; December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.

When Professor Godfrey St. Peter and wife move to a new house, he becomes uncomfortable with the route his life is taking. He keeps on his dusty study in the old house in an attempt to hang on to his old life. The marriages of his two daughters have removed them from the home and added two new sons-in-law, precipitating a mid-life crisis that leaves the Professor feeling as though he has lost the will to live because he has nothing to look forward to.

Don Hedger had lived for four years on the top floor of an old house on the south side of Washington Square, and nobody had ever disturbed him. He occupied one big room with no outside exposure except on the north, where he had built in a many-paned studio window that looked upon a court and upon the roofs and walls of other buildings. His room was very cheerless, since he never got a ray of direct sunlight; the south corners were always in shadow. In one of the corners was a clothes closet, built against the partition, in another a wide divan, serving as a seat by day and a bed by night. In the front corner, the one farther from the window, was a sink, and a table with two gas burners where he sometimes cooked his food. There, too, in the perpetual dusk, was the dog’s bed, and often a bone or two for his comfort.

A collection of short stories by Willa Cather, featuring: Coming, Aphrodite!, A Gold Slipper, Scandal, Paul's Case, A Wagner Matinee, The Sculptor's Funeral, A Death in the Desert.

The final book in the prairie trilogy of novels, preceded by O Pioneers! And The Song of the Lark, the book follows life of Antonia Shimerda. The story of Antonia Shimerda is told by one of her friends from childhood, Jim Burden, an orphaned boy from Virginia.

The novel follows life of the Bergsons, a family of Swedish immigrants in the farm country near the fictional town of Hanover, Nebraska. The main character, Alexandra Bergson, inherits the family farmland when her father dies and devotes her life to making the farm a viable enterprise at a time when many other immigrant families are giving up and leaving the prairie.

My Antonia tells the stories of an orphaned boy from Virginia, Jim Burden, and the elder daughter in a family of Bohemian immigrants, Ántonia Shimerda, who are each brought to be pioneers in Nebraska towards the end of the 19th century, as children. Ántonia must work as a servant on the farms of her neighbors after her father commits suicide. She elopes with a railway conductor but returns home and eventually becomes the patient and strong wife of a Bohemian farmer, Anton Cuzak, the mother of a large family and a typical woman of the pioneer West.