Sapphira and the Slave Girl by Willa Cather

Sapphira and the Slave Girl by Willa Cather

Willa Cather's twelfth and final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, is her most intense fictional engagement with political and personal conflict. Set in Cather's Virginia birthplace in 1856, the novel draws on family and local history and the escalating conflicts of the last years of slavery-conflicts in which Cather's family members were deeply involved, both as slave owners and as opponents of slavery. Cather, at five years old, appears as a character in an unprecedented first-person epilogue. Tapping her earliest memories, Cather powerfully and sparely renders a Virginia world that is simultaneously beautiful and, as she said, terrible. The historical essay and explanatory notes explore the novel's grounding in family, local, and national history; show how southern cultures continually shaped Cather's life and work, culminating with this novel; and trace the progress of Cather's research and composition during years of grief and loss that she described as the worst of her life. More early drafts, including manuscript fragments, are available for Sapphira and the Slave Girl than for any other Cather novel, and the revealing textual essay draws on this rich resource to provide new insights into Cather's composition process. Ann Romines, a professor of English at the George Washington University, is a well-known Cather scholar. She is the author and editor of several books, including Willa Cather's Southern Connections: New Essays on Cather and the South. Charles W. Mignon and Frederick M. Link are both professors emeritus of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and textual editors of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition series. Kari A. Ronning is a research associate professor of English, assistant editor of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition series, and codirector of the Willa Cather Journalism project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Wila Cather was probably born in Virginia in 1873, although her parents did not register the date, and it is probably incorrectly given on her tombstone. Because she is so famous for her Nebraska novels, many people assume she was born there, but Wila Cather was about nine years old when her family moved to a small Nebraska frontier town called Red Cloud that was populated by immigrant Swedes, Bohemians, Germans, Poles, Czechs, and Russians. The oldest of seven children, she was educated at home, studied with a Latin neighbor, and read the English classics in the evening. By the time she went to the University of Nebraska in 1891-where she began by wearing boy's clothes and cut her hair close to her head-she had decided to be a writer.

After graduation she worked for a Lincoln, Nebraska, newspaper, then moved to Pittsburgh and finally to New York City. There she joined McClure's magazine, a popular muckraking periodical that encouraged the writing of new young authors. After meeting the author Sarah Orne Jewett, she decided to quit journalism and devote herself full time to fiction. Her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, appeared in serial form in McClure's in 1912. But her place in American literature was established with her first Nebraska novel, O Pioneers!, published in 1913, which was followed by her most famous pioneer novel, My Antonia, in 1918. In 1922 she won the Pulitzer Prize for one of her lesser-known books. One of Ours. Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), her masterpiece, and Shadows on the Rock (1931) also celebrated the pioneer spirit, but in the Southwest and French Canada. Her other novels include The Song of the Lark (1915), The Professor's House (1925), My Mortal Enemy (1926), and Lucy Gayheart (1935). Wila Cather died in 1947.

SKU	GOR014038051
ISBN 13	9780307739650
ISBN 10	0307739651
Title	Sapphira and the Slave Girl
Author	Willa Cather
Series	Vintage Classics
Condition	Well read
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2010-12-07
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
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