Alexander's Bridge - Softcover
From one of America's finest novelists comes an absorbing story of one man's mid-life crisis and struggle of conscience. Bartley Alexander is an engineer who has just received the greatest commission of his career - to design the Moorlock Bridge in Canada. Despite Bartley's professional success and apparently happy marriage, there is something missing in his life. An encounter with an old flame in London gives him a second lease on life, but can he reconcile this affair with his sense of personal integrity? Willa Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge is a thoughtful and compelling look at how our choices affect us and those around us.
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From the Publisher:
Bartley Alexander, an engineer famous for the audacious structure of his North American bridges, is at the height of his reputation. He has a distinguished and beautiful wife and an enviable Boston home. Then, on a trip to London, he has a chance encounter with an Irish actress he once loved. When their affair re–ignites, Alexander finds himself caught in a tug of emotions — between his feelings for wife, who has supported his career with understanding and strength, and Hilda, whose impulsiveness and generosity restore to him the passion and energy of his youth. Coinciding with this personal dilemma are ominous signs of strain in his professional life. In this, her first novel, originally published in 1912, Willa Cather skillfully explores the struggle between opposing sides of the self, a facility that was to become a hallmark of her craft.
From the Back Cover:
Alexander's Bridge (1912), Willa Cather's first novel, tells the story of Bartley Alexander, a successful engineer torn between duty to his career and wife, and his passion for the Irish actress Hilda Burgoyne. In spare but often searing prose, Cather's taut novella traces a mid-life crisis of self-doubt and disappointment that ends in a spectacular catastrophe. Cather's portraits of indomitable women on the Nebraska frontier in the novels O Pioneers! and My Antonia are well-known, but Alexander's Bridge shows her working in another, equally important mode, using urban settings and the figure of the bridge-builder to analyse America's emergence as an international industrial power at the turn of the twentieth century. Both anxious and celebratory, Alexander's Bridge anticipates The Great Gatsby in trying to reckon with the social and emotional costs of a new era in American life.
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- PublisherAkasha Classics
- Publication date2009
- ISBN 10 1605124281
- ISBN 13 9781605124285
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages98
- Rating
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