Willa Cather 
The Song of the Lark (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) 

The Song of the Lark tells a tale of struggle and courage in which a determined protagonist forges a self equal to a wild and outsized land.  However, the heroic figure at the center of this story is not a woodsman or an explorer as in most frontier novels.  Thea Kronborg is a young girl growing up in a small Colorado town with a ‘secret something’ inside her, and what she must conquer is not a people or a land, but an art.  She dreams big and gets what she dreams of: a brilliant success as a Wagnerian soprano. 

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Willa Sibert Cather was born near Winchester, Virginia, in 1873.  At the age of nine her family moved to frontier Nebraska.  Many of Willa Cathers own experiences went into The Song of the Lark: the story of a gifted girl growing up in a small western town and finding in the wide-open landscape a dazzling equivalent to her own expansive sense of self.  While attending the University of Nebraska her ambitions turned toward writing, managing the college newspaper and working as a columnist. Later, she taught high school in Pittsburgh and worked as an editor for Mc Clures. Not until age thirty-seven did Cather leave the journalistic world to pursue fiction-writing full time, becoming one of America’s major novelists.