In this haunting 1935 novel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of My Ántonia performs crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction: the impermanence of innocence, the opposition between prairie and city, provincial American values and world culture, and the grandeur, elation, and heartache that await a gifted young woman who leaves her small Nebraska town to pursue a life in art. At the age of eighteen, Lucy Gayheart heads for Chicago to study music. She is beautiful and impressionable and ardent, and these qualities attract the attention of Clement Sebastian, an aging but charismatic singer who exercises all the tragic, sinister fascination of a man who has renounced life only to turn back to seize it one last time. Out of their doomed love affair—and Lucy's fatal estrangement from her origins—Willa Cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a Schubert sonata. "The unity of Miss Cather's design, the clarity and distinction of this book, should put it beside her first great success, My Ántonia ." — The Times Literary Supplement (London) t ist achtzehn, einen temperamentvolle junge Frau voller Charme und Vitalitaet und eine gute Pianistin. Als das Leben in dem Provinzstaedtchen Haverford sie zu ersticken droht, flieht sie nach Chicago, um dort Musik zu studieren. Doch sie ist nicht zur Kuenstlerin geboren, denn fuer eine grosse Karriere fehlt es ihr an Wille und Disziplin. Diese bittere Erkenntnis trifft Lucy wie ein Blitz, als sie den Opernsaenger Sebastian zum ersten Mal singen hoert. Es ist eine Begegnung, die ihr weiteres Leben schicksalhaft veraendern soll. WILLA CATHER , author of twelve novels, including O Pioneers!, My Ántonia , and Death Comes for the Archbishop , was born in Virginia in 1873 but grew up in Nebraska, where many of her novels are set. She died in 1947 in New York City. Used Book in Good Condition