Alexander's Bridge

Alexander's Bridge (1912), Willa Cather's first novel, tells the story of Bartley Alexander, a successful engineer torn between duty to his career and wife, and his passion for the Irish actress Hilda Burgoyne. In spare but often searing prose, Cather's taut novella traces a mid-life crisis of self-doubt and disappointment that ends in a spectacular catastrophe. Cather's portraits of indomitable women on the Nebraska frontier in the novels O Pioneers! and My Antonia are well-known, but Alexander's Bridge shows her working in another, equally important mode, using urban settings and the figure of the bridge-builder to analyse America's emergence as an international industrial power at the turn of the twentieth century. Both anxious and celebratory, Alexander's Bridge anticipates The Great Gatsby in trying to reckon with the social and emotional costs of a new era in American life.

Willa Cather's first published novel, set in Boston, London, and Paris, is the story of a man unable to resolve the contradictions in his own nature. The central figures are Bartley Alexander, a world-famous engineer; his wife; Winifred, a Boston society matron; and his former love, Hilda Burgoyne, a London actress. Long considered an uncharacteristic production, in the light of recent scholarship "Alexander's Bridge" is seen to be closely linked to the body of Cather's work, thematically as well as in its use of myth and symbol. Bernice Slote's introduction considers the circumstances of its composition and its relationship to the later novels, particularly "One of Ours," "The Professor's House," and "Lucy Gayheart," The text has been entirely reset from the first (1912) edition.