A few years back, I saw a piece of theater that moved me deeply. I later learned that their story, while original, was inspired by the work of American author Willa Cather. …Honestly, I don’t think I’d ever heard of her. I sought out the novel My Ántonia, and my world was changed.
For my 33 in 3 list, I wanted to add some kind of reading goal, and this felt right. Willa Cather wrote 12 novels (and a handful of other poetry collections, etc), and I look forward to checking them all off of my list. Below are the 12 titles, struck through if I have already read them.
- Alexander’s Bridge (1912)
O Pioneers!(1913)The Song of the Lark(1915)My Ántonia(1918)- One of Ours (1922)
- A Lost Lady (1923)
- The Professor’s House (1925)
- My Mortal Enemy (1926)
Death Comes for the Archbishop(1927)- Shadows on the Rock (1931)
- Lucy Gayheart (1935)
- Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940)
My favorite so far remains the first one I picked up, My Ántonia. It wasn’t Ántonia that I fell in love with, it was Nebraska. Cather has a beautiful way of describing the early 1900s landscape, especially in her “Prairie Trilogy.” I’m finding the same to be true in the novel I’m finishing up now, The Song of the Lark, which deals more with rural Colorado and urban Chicago.
I hope I’ll connect with the rest on the list as much as I have with the Prairie Trilogy. Her novel One of Ours won the Pulitzer Prize; perhaps that would be a good one to end with.