The Song of the Lark

Song of the Lark

By Willa Cather

Published 1915

Free on Kindle

I previously wrote about another novel by Willa Cather (1873-1947), The Professor’s House, and cover her history a bit more in that one. She is one of the best American novelists, considered in the top 10 and won the Pulitzer Prize for  One of Ours in 1922, a novel set in World War 1.

The Song of the Lark was written in 1915 and the story takes place in 1890s Colorado. The area is still being settled and there are many different groups of people living together during the frontier days. The story follows a young musician, Thea Kronberg, as she develops as an artists.

Novels that follow a character from early youth to adulthood are called Bildungsroman, a German term meaning a “novel of education.” Other notable Bildungsromans are A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and my favorite novel Of Human Bondage. See my post.

I have started work on my Master’s Thesis and I am writing about The Song of the Lark using a postcolonial theory lens to analyze characters. The idea for this paper came about because of readings I was doing for an American literature class on Modernism. Thats the early 20th century. I was reading the book when I started to get a real positive portrayal of the Mexican characters. This stood out because I had finished a previous novel, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, where the Mexican characters were portrayed or described very negatively. I kept reading the novel and got a more complex approach, in that some of the white characters insult the Mexican characters and other are looked down upon for being friends with them. I thought that Cather was doing something interesting with the race relations in the novel and wanted to explore that a bit more.  I wanted to do an analysis of the characters so that I could understand more about what was going on with them and what Cather was saying implicitly and through the narration.

Cather is a very skilled writer and can put two sentences together to give meaning and complicate ideas without having to say anything. She did not want to be limited in her interpretation so she leaves things unsaid, using silence to leave open the many possible interpretations of the text.

The Song of the Lark is the latest novel I have read by Cather and is currently my favorite. This is the second book in her “Prairie Trilogy,” following O Pioneers! and preceding My Antonia. Both of which are free in ebook. Download some samples and start reading some of the best American Literature.

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2012 Literary Awards

Cover via Amazon

Every year there are a number of awards that highlight some of the best literature and writers. With so much being published and people having less and less time to read, awards are a good place to find books to read. Literature awards are also a good place to follow along with the happenings in the literature world as well as discover new writers. 

Nobel Prize In Literature

One of the highest honors a writer can get is the Nobel Prize in Literature. This award is given to writers for their body of work. It is not limited to a country or type of writing. The award can go to any writer writing in any language. It is a very exciting award because of all the rumors that fly around. “Will so and so finally win?” There is a long list of great writers around the world that are considered for this and you can count on being surprised by the winner. This year was no exception. Mo Yan, a chinese novelist and short story writer, won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature. This is a very controversial selection and many people, including Chinese dissidents and past prize winners were critical of the choice. No one is critical of his writings. He seems like a fascination writer, one that defends censorship while being censored himself. I had never heard of him before he won the award and it seems he is one of the most well read writers in the world and barely known here in the US. Here are some of his most popular novels.

Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out $8.98
The Garlic Ballads $3.99
Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh $7.69

The Pulitzer Prize

The Pulitzer Prize for fiction  is “awarded for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” There are also many other awards ranging from journalist to nonfiction. The Award was founded in 1918. Some previous winners are Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. This is yet another controversial year for a coveted award. This years winner is NOBODY! The panel that judges the winner is made up of 3 judges. There were three novels on the short list and each judge chose a different author. It was a three way tie with no winned and so no award will be given in 2012. This has happened a few times in its long history. This is a great award to follow highlighting some of the best fiction by American writers. Here are the three finalist. 

David Foster Wallace - The Pale King $8.89
Karen Russel - Swamplandia! $9.99
Denis Johnson - Train Dreams: A Novella $9.99

English: Announcement of the Laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2008 at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm by Horace Engdahl Deutsch: Bekanntgabe des Preisträgers des Literatur-Nobelpreises 2008 durch Horace Engdahl in der Schwedischen Akademie in Stockholm Svenska: Nobelpriset i litteratur år 2008, Horace Engdahl i Svenska Akademien Français : Prix Nobel de littérature pour l'année 2008 Español: El premio Nobel de literatura 2008 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

National Book Award

The National Book Award’s mission is to “celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of good writing in America.” This book has a long and varied past and is one of the major awards given to American writers. This is another great place to find books to read and they do a lot of outreach to communities and in supporting public appearances by writers. Faulkner, Pynchon, Updike, McCarthy, and Franzen are someof the past nominees and winners. This years winner is Louise Erdrich with The Round House.

The Round House $12.99

And the runners up.

Junot Diaz - This Is How You Lose Her $12.99
Dave Eggers - A Hologram for the King $9.99
Ben Fountain - Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk: A Novel $9.68
Kevin Powers - The Yellow Birds: A Novel $9.99

The Man-Booker Prize

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe, according to Wikipedia. This is a very big deal. This is the biggest of the English Language awards given. They have a long list which they announce very early on and then a short list is selected out of that. They have had their own share of controversy but this year was free of any. Hilary Mantel won for the second time in 5 years for her historical novel Bring Up the Bodies. This is a major award to follow because it includes many countries that speak English and covers a diverse range of topics. I discovered a couple of my favorite writers while reading these novels, Julian Barnes and J.M. Coetzee.

Bring Up the Bodies: A Novel $13.49

Please note all the prices are accurate as of the time of this post, in the US Amazon store. You can check out the other awards given by the different organizations. I study and follow fiction and so these are just the awards that I like to keep up on. I try to read the Pulitzer and the Man Booker every year. They also have many different awards for nonfiction, science fiction, horror, and children’s books.

Check out our Facebook Page and Like us to keep up to date on the latest Kindle Literature news. You can share this post or any others on your social media of choice and bookmark the site for future post. You can also grab the RSS feed or try a   free 2 week trial*  on your Kindle to have the posts delivered directly to your Kindle. Follow me on twitter @seframos. Happy Reading.

The Professor's House

Willa Cather
The Professor's House - $4.65
Published in 1925

Willa Cather was a Pulitzer Prize winning American writer. She was a very confident writer, working for years on novels to produce a very specific voice. She did not fit in with other women writers of her time and is said to have “regarded most women writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental and mawkish.” She is now recognized as a major American writer and the foremost woman writer.

In undergrad, I had the pleasure of taking a Willa Cather course with a renowned Cather Scholar Dr. Margaret Doane. Dr. Doane has published over 60 articles and papers dealing with many themes in various Cather novels. We read several novels by Willa Cather and The Professor’s House was the one that made the most impact on me.

The novel is split into three parts. The first concerns the family of Professor Godfrey St. Peter and the midlife crisis he is experiencing after winning an award for his life’s work. He has lost his lust for life after publishing his life’s work and still having a life to live after. He has become estranged with his family and is mourning the death of a brilliant pupil, Tom Outland. The second part is the story of Tom Outland that the Professor is editing from Tom’s journals. The last part concerns the Professor trying to hang on to his old life while his family is away on a trip in Europe.

The novel, like most great novels, has inspired a wide array of readings. A common reading of the novel is that it’s a “story about the moral decline of a money driven society.” This was a popular reading of the novel for many years until the novel and Willa Cather began to be studied more widely. Dr. Doane was the first to do a feminist reading of The Professor’s House. Willa Cather was a woman writing a man’s view of women. Generally, the views of the male characters were viewed as her views. It wasn't until doing a feminist reading of the novel that you can see that “the Professor strongly feels women, particularly those in his family, are destructive and petty.” The Professor is always amazed with women even though he finds fault with them. Professor “St. Peter and other males’ --thoughts about women shows a perspective which is both prejudiced and insensitive.”

The readings of the novel range from societal critique to feminist readings and more recently homosexual readings. Whichever reading you choose to use, The Professor’s House is a novel worth reading. This is not her most famous novel or the one she won awards for, but it is the one that defines Willa Cather for me. Download a sample and check out the foremost American woman writer.

Check out our Facebook Page and “Like” us to keep up to date on the latest Kindle Literature news. You can share this post or any others on your social media of choice and bookmark the site for future post. You can also grab the RSS feed or try a free 2 week trial* on your Kindle to have the posts delivered directly to your Kindle. Follow me on twitter @seframos. Happy Reading.