The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather

The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather

The daughter of a Swedish minister, growing up in Colorado, Thea Kronborg's adolescent ability on the piano is encouraged by her eccentric German music teacher, Professor Wuncsch and by the kindly but unhappily married Dr Howard Archie. Set apart from the townspeople by her talents, Thea's friends are far from conventional. At 17 she leaves them and her mother's influence to go to Chicago where she studies with the pianist Andor Harsanyi. Overhearing her singing in a church he is the mentor who discovers the potential of her singing voice and sends her to study with the chill and selfish Madison Bowers, whom she dislikes. Her story moves to Arizona when she and a wealthy young brewer, Fred Ottenburg fall in love. A tension between her relationship with him and the driving artistic impulse that has always ruled her develops and becomes the novel's compelling central theme. Cather's lyrical, atmospheric and moving novel is a thinly veiled autobiography of a female artist in America at the turn of the century. A mature work filled with memorable characters all of whom influence Thea in different ways, The Song of the Lark deserves to be read alongside O Pioneers! and My Antonia and fully justifies Cather's status as one of America's greatest twentieth-century writers.

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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780192832016
ISBN 10	0192832018
Title	The Song of the Lark
Author	Willa Cather
Series	Oxford World's Classics
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Year published	2000-05-04
Number of pages	468
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.