In this haunting novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of My �ntonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop performs a series of crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction: the impermanence of innocence, the opposition between prairie and city, provincial American values and world culture, and the grandeur, elation, and heartache that await a gifted young woman who leaves her small Nebraska town to pursue a life in art. At the age of eighteen, Lucy Gayheart heads for Chicago to study music. ...
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In this haunting novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of My �ntonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop performs a series of crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction: the impermanence of innocence, the opposition between prairie and city, provincial American values and world culture, and the grandeur, elation, and heartache that await a gifted young woman who leaves her small Nebraska town to pursue a life in art. At the age of eighteen, Lucy Gayheart heads for Chicago to study music. She is beautiful and impressionable and ardent, and these qualities attract the attention of Clement Sebastian, an aging but charismatic singer who exercises all the tragic, sinister fascination of a man who has renounced life only to turn back to seize it one last time. Out of their doomed love affair-and Lucy's fatal estrangement from her origins-Willa Cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a Schubert sonata.
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Very good. Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and may have some shelf wear or limited writing. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority!
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Very good. Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and may have some shelf wear or limited writing. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority!
Willa Cather's short, poignant 1935 novel "Lucy Gayheart" is a story of music and dashed dreams. The story takes place in the early twentieth century and contrasts the American plains, in Haverford, Nebraska, with large urban America, with its promise and perils, in Chicago.
The heroine of the book, Lucy Gayheart, has great pianistic talent. She leaves Haverford at the age of 18 to study piano, and to give music lessons, in Chicago. She meets a great but disillusioned and world-weary singer, Clement Sebastian, and has the opportunity to work with him as an accompanist. Cather loves and beautifully describes in the novel Schubert's wonderful song-cycles "Die Winterreise" and "Die Schone Mullerein". Both the winter cold and the lovely maiden of Schubert's two cycles are mirrored in the book. Lucy ultimately is seemingly faced with the choice between Sebastian and her hometown sweetheart.
Faced with tragedy in Chicago from both Sebastian and her former love, Lucy returns home. She gears herself to begin life anew but tragedy again intervenes.
Cather offers a great deal of description of the snow and the cold in both Chicago and Haverford. The book gives a sense of the tragic sense of life, with a hint of the power of art and religious faith to overcome it. The opposition between city life and provincial town life is similar to Sinclair Lewis's Main Street but with more depth and craft in the writing. The author's love for music, the human voice and the piano receives eloquently expression in the novel.
"Lucy Gayheart" is a beautifully wrought book which deserves to be better known.
