Alexander's Bridge (World's Classics)

by WillaCather (Author), Marilee Lindemann (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  1997

  $7.06

  Willa Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912), tells the story of Bartley Alexander, a successful engineer torn between his duties to his career and his wife Winifred, 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. For readers who know Cather chiefly for her portraits of indomitable women on the Nebraska frontier - in such works as O Pioneers! and My Antonia - Alexander's Bridge shows the novelist working in another, equally important mode, using urban settings and the figure of the bridge-builder to analyze America's emergence as an international, industrial power at the turn into the 20th century. Both anxious and celebratory, the novel anticipates The Great Gatsby in trying to reckon with the social and emotional costs of that emergence.

• Used

  Paperback
  1990

  $6.92

  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.