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.

Alexander's Bridge is a novel written by popular American author Willa Cather. Originally published in 1912, and is the story of a construction engineer and world-renowned builder of bridges, Bartley Alexander, who is going through a mid-life crisis. Bartley, married to wife Winifred, has an affair with a former lover, Hilda, in London. Alexander's Bridge is highly recommended for those who enjoy the writings of Willa Cather and for those who are discovering her writings for the first time.