Antonia Shimerda, the destitute child of Bohemian immigrants, and Jim Burden, a native Virginian who, after being orphaned at the age of ten, is sent to live with his grandparents in Nebraska. Jim goes to Harvard, becomes a traveling busnissman,a nd returns to Nebraska infrequently; Antonia elopes with a shiftless railroad conductor, comes home disgraced, and finds happiness with Anton Cuzak, a gentle farmer.

John Bergson, a Swedish farmer, struggles desperately with the soil but dies unsatisfied. His daughter Alexandra resolves to vindicate his faith, and her strong character carries her weak older brothers and her mother along to a new zest for life. Years of privation are rewarded on the farm. But when Alexandra falls in love with Carl Linstrum, and her family objects because he is poor, he leaves to seek a different career. After Alexandra's younger...

"Written from the perspective of a male narrator, Willa Cather's classic novel is an American version of "Madame Bovary". It is a portrait of a talented woman trapped in the conventions and economic restraints of a marriage. It is the story of a woman who defies expectations, and whose personal changes coincide with the transforming American Frontier. In this work, Willa Cather expressed her profoundly modern feminist views in the life of an ordinary...

Story of a woman who leaves her Nebraska home, headed to Stanford and a promising career as a film editor, and the boy she leaves behind. Many years later, as her marriage falters, she reaches out to him.

"After her life as she knows it is ended by heartbreak, Mary Rasmussen, a strong-willed and independent young ranch woman living in the Sandhills of western Nebraska, suddenly feels that all she has believed in--God, her instincts, the land itself--has failed her, and she abandons her cultural and emotional ties, succumbing to circumstances she thinks she is powerless to control. In a rash decision, she marries a conservative, patriarchal preacher...

The novel explores the cowboy lives of Monte Walsh and Chet Rollins as they carouse, ride, and work at the Slash Y with Cal Brennan. As the West changes and their cowboy antics are challenged, the two must part ways to pursue new ways of life. Chet marries and goes on to become a successful merchant and then a politician, while Monte can only find solace in continuing the cowboys way of life until the very end.

"Boyhood is the most familiar province of Mark Twain's fiction, but a reader doesn't have to look far to find feminine territory - and it's not the perfectly neat and respectable place where you'd expect to see Becky Thatcher. This is a fictional world where rather than polishing their domestic arts and waiting for marriage proposals, girls are fighting battles, riding stallions, rescuing boys from rivers, cross-dressing, debating religion, hunting,...