Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather

Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather

In this haunting 1935 novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of My ntonia performs crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction: the impermanence of innocence, the opposition between prairie and city, provincial American values and world culture, and the grandeur, elation, and heartache that await a gifted young woman who leaves her small Nebraska town to pursue a life in art.

At the age of eighteen, Lucy Gayheart heads for Chicago to study music. She is beautiful and impressionable and ardent, and these qualities attract the attention of Clement Sebastian, an aging but charismatic singer who exercises all the tragic, sinister fascination of a man who has renounced life only to turn back to seize it one last time. Out of their doomed love affair--and Lucy's fatal estrangement from her origins--Willa Cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a Schubert sonata.

Willa Sibert Cather (1873 – 1947) was an American author best known for her novels about life on the Great Plains' frontier, such as O Pioneers! One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I, won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Cather was born in Virginia and raised in Nebraska, where she attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She spent eleven years in Pittsburgh, working as a magazine editor and high school English teacher to support herself. She relocated to New York City at the age of 33, where she spent the rest of her life, but she also traveled extensively and spent time at her summer house on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick.