The Troll Garden and Selected Stories

In the stories that comprise The Troll Garden, her first book, Willa Cather evokes the devastated, romantic dreams that haunt her characters. Artists, inveterate sentimentalists, hungering beauties, and demon-ridden ascetics find themselves torn between the need to confess and keep secret their private aspirations. Involved with the hope that destroys the spirit, their lives reflect both the impoverished materialism and the deadly idealism of the Plains country, of the fashionable East, and of London at the turn of the century.

Willa Cather is among the most eminent female American authors. She is known for her depictions of U.S. prairie life in novels like O Pioneers, My Antonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Cather was born in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley but her family relocated to Nebraska in 1883 and she spent the rest of her childhood in Red Cloud, Nebraska. She insisted on attending college, so her family borrowed money so she could enrol at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. While there she became a regular contributor to the Nebraska State Journal.

After failing to obtain a position at UNL, she moved to Pennsylvania, where she taught high school and worked for Home Monthly and McClure's Magazine. The latter publication serialized her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, which was heavily influenced by Henry James. For her novels she returned to the prairie for inspiration, and these works became popular and critical successes. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours (1922).