Lucy Gayheart
by Willa Cather
In this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, My Anthony's for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Archbishop and Death Is Coming, he exhibits a series of crystalline variations on themes that plague his greatest fiction: the impermanence of innocence, the conflict between prairie and city, provincial American values and world culture, and the greatness, glory, and heartache that await a talented young woman who leaves her small town in Nebraska, prolonging life in art. Lucy Gayhart travels to Chicago to study music when she is eighteen years old. She is beautiful, vulnerable and passionate, and these qualities attract the attention of Clement Sebastian, an aging but charismatic singer who realizes all the tragic, sinister admiration of a man who gives up his life only to seize it for the last time. Will Cather creates a novel as devastatingly spectacular as Schubert's sonata, from his doomed love affairs and Lucy's deadly alienation from her origins.
