The Professor's House

Willa Cather

ISBN 10: 0679731806 / ISBN 13: 9780679731801

Published by Random House USA Inc, 1990

About this Item

The scholarly edition of The Professor's House incorporates into its textual analysis findings from a recently discovered and significantly reworked draft of the novel. Willa Cather's perennial claims that there were no extant drafts make this discovery especially important to Cather scholars. Written in 1925, when she was fifty-two years old, The Professor's House was Cather's seventh novel. Cather explained that in this novel she had attempted two structural experiments. The first experiment she took from the practice of early French and Spanish novelists of inserting a nouvelle into the roman, hence the first-person Tom Outland's Story wedged between the other two parts of the novel. Second, she compared the novel's structure to a sonata form in music, with the center section in significant contrast to the surrounding sections Behind the understated prose relating the story of Professor Godfrey St. Peter, who, despite his success, experiences at midcareer a profound disappointment with life, is the fierce account of how he decides to continue living despite those disappointments. Tom Outland's thrilling tale of a long-lost civilization is both an ironic contrast to the professor's staid outer life and a mirror of the imaginative interior life he experiences in his attic study. James Woodress is a professor emeritus of American literature at the University of California, Davis, and the author of many books, including Willa Cather: A Literary Life (Nebraska 1987). Kari A. Ronning is a research associate for the Willa Cather Project at the University of Nebraska. Frederick M. Link is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Nebraska.

Seller Inventory # 00104519442

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Professor's House
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Publication Date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679731806
• ISBN 13: 9780679731801
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Fair

About this title

Synopsis

A lyrical and bittersweet novel of a middle-aged man losing control of his life that's a brilliant study in emotional dislocation and renewal—from one of the most highly acclaimed authors of the twentieth century.

Professor Godfrey St. Peter is a man in his fifties who has devoted his life to his work, his wife, his garden, and his daughters, and achieved success with all of them. But when St. Peter is called on to move to a new, more comfortable house, something in him rebels. And although at first that rebellion consists of nothing more than mild resistance to his family's wishes, it imperceptibly comes to encompass the entire order of his life. The Professor's House combines a delightful grasp of the social and domestic rituals of a Midwestern university town in the 1920s with profound spiritual and psychological introspection.

About the Author

WILLA CATHER, author of twelve novels, including O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop, was born in Virginia in 1873 but grew up in Nebraska, where many of her novels are set. She died in 1947 in New York City.