> Skip to content
  • Published: 15 August 2012
  • ISBN: 9781612191058
  • Imprint: Melville House
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $22.99

Alexander's Bridge





Willa Cather's first novel

The characteristic themes of Cather’s mature work are already present in her debut novella, an evocation of a tragic love triangle.
 
Bartley Alexander, renowned engineer of bridges, is a man with a past who “looked as a tamer of rivers ought to look.” Discovered by his mentor “sowing wild oats in London,” he returned to America and the commission that made his name. Now, married to his wife of ten years, a chance encounter with actress Hilda Burgoyne, an almost forgotten love from his past, prompts a doomed attempt to recapture the boundlessness of his youth.

***

This is a Hybrid Book.

Melville House HybridBooks combine print and digital media into an enhanced reading experience by including with each title additional curated material called Illuminations — maps, photographs, illustrations, and further writing about the author and the book.

The Melville House Illuminations are free with the purchase of any title in the HybridBook series, no matter the format.

Purchasers of the print version can obtain the Illuminations for a given title simply by scanning the QR code found in the back of each book, or by following the url also given in the back of the print book, then downloading the Illumination in whatever format works best for you.
Purchasers of the digital version receive the appropriate Illuminations automatically as part of the ebook edition.

  • Published: 15 August 2012
  • ISBN: 9781612191058
  • Imprint: Melville House
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Willa Cather

Novels by Willa CatherAlexander'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
Short Fiction

The Troll Garden 1905 Youth and the Bright Medusa 1920 Obscure Destinies 1932 The Old Beauty and Others 1948 Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction, 1892-1912 1965 Uncle Valentine and Other Stories: Willa Cather's Uncollected Short Fiction, 1915-1929 1972

Introducer Biography: Elaine Showalter is the author of the recent ground-breaking study of American women writers, A Jury of Her Peers, and the classic A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing.

Also by Willa Cather

See all

Praise for Alexander's Bridge

"[Cather] gives a very good account of herself indeed. She writes carefully, skillfully, artistically. Her dialogue has life in it and gets her story ahead. Her occasional paragraphs of description are full of feeling and color."
--H.L. Menken
"When it at last moves into its true theme, the mortal division in a man's nature, it gathers an intensity and power which comes from some deeper level of feeling ... It is as if her true voice, submerged before in conventional speech, had broken through, and were speaking in irrepressible accents of passion and authority." --Edith Lewis, Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record
"She wrote twelve novels, most of them about the great subject of early-twentieth-century literature--the gulf between the mind and the world ...Cather could never be mistaken for a nineteenth-century writer: her austere style is part of modernist classicism, her tragic vision part of modernist pessimism." -- Joan Acocella, The New Yorker

penguin pop image
penguin pop image