Alexander's Bridge (version 3)

Willa Cather was born in Virginia in 1873 and died in 1947, but she grew up in Nebraska, and it was the prairie landscape that inspired her best-known novels, such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Alexander’s Bridge, published in 1912, was her first novel. It was issued under the name Willa Sibert Cather, and its setting, in Boston and London, is quite different from the Nebraska of her later work.

The book shows the strong influence of Henry James, whose novels of manners and moral choice she admired. Cather herself later said that the story was written before she had found her own subject. Even so, it already has her careful prose and her sense of emotional truth. The bridge is more than a profession for the hero; it is a symbol of the structure on which his life rests.

This is the third LibriVox version of the novel. It has eleven chapters and lasts about two and a half hours, with readings by two volunteers. It is an ideal choice for an evening or a short journey. For readers who know Cather’s later work, it is interesting to see where she began; for newcomers, it is a compact, elegant and thoughtful story that can be enjoyed on its own.

The relationship between work and private life is the book’s central theme, and Cather handles it without melodrama. Descriptions of the city, the river and the half-built bridge give the story a concrete setting, while the characters' inner lives are suggested with delicacy. A thoughtful early work by one of America’s major novelists.