Willa Cather

Alexander's Bridge Willa Cather

Willa Cather's first novel, "Alexander's Bridge" (1912), tells the story of Bartley Alexander, a successful engineer torn between his duties to his career and his wife Winifred, 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. For readers who know Cather chiefly for her portraits of indomitable women on the Nebraska frontier - in such works as "O Pioneers!" and "My Antonia" - "Alexander's Bridge" shows the novelist working in another, equally important mode, using urban settings and the figure of the bridge-builder to analyze America's emergence as an international, industrial power at the turn into the 20th century. Both anxious and celebratory, the novel anticipates "The Great Gatsby" in trying to reckon with the social and emotional costs of that emergence.