Author Description

In this, Willa Cather's first novel, we find Bartley Alexander, a successful engineer torn bewteen his duties to his career and his wife, and his passion for an Irish actress. In the only critical edition available, we see how Cather uses urban settings and the figure of the bridge-builder to analyze America's emergence as an international, industrial power at the turn of the century. Both anxious and celebratory, Cather's novel anticipates The Great Gatsby in trying to reckon with the social and emotional costs of that emergence.