By Taylor Jasmine | On August 5, 2017 | Updated October 1, 2026 | Comments (2)
Published in 1935, Lucy Gayheart is American author Willa Cather’s eleventh novel. The story of a young woman from a small prairie town who travels to Chicago to pursue a life in music, it is written in Cather’s inimitable clear, fresh prose style.
A synopsis of Lucy Gayheart from a contemporary reprint
From the 1996 Vintage edition: “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. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On July 25, 2017 | Updated January 17, 2026 | Comments (0)
Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith (1950) was her first novel, and has remained, along with the Ripley series, among her best-known works. It has been adapted for film and television several times, the most iconic being the 1951 adaptation directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
This psychological thriller involves two men who meet, not surprisingly, on a train. One of them proposes that they “swap murders.”
This twisty novel marked the start of Patricia Highsmith’s prolific career as a crime novelist, the genre that made her reputation (with one exception being The Price of Salt, the lesbian love story published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan in 1952). Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On July 25, 2017 | Updated February 12, 2026 | Comments (0)
When The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith was published in 1952, it was a rarity in lesbian literature. Lesbian pulp novels were quite a thing around that time, but in order to pass censors, one of the two protagonists had to either come to a bad end or realize that she was straight, after all.
The Price of Salt, however, was a rare lesbian novel with a relatively happy ending (the couple stays together, but Carol must relinquish custody of her child). Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On July 21, 2017 | Updated November 18, 2022 | Comments (1)
The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald (1946) is the book that put this author of humorous fiction and nonfiction on the map.
Not only did the book become a world-wide bestseller, the film version starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray was hugely popular as well.
While many contemporary readers still adore the book, others are deeply disturbed by its blatant racism against Native Americans as well as its classism and snobbery toward those the author describes as Neighbors with a purposeful capital. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On July 20, 2017 | Updated November 18, 2022 | Comments (2)
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) is often considered one of Willa Cather’s best novels, if not her masterpiece. It’s a fixture on numerous listings of best American literature of the twentieth century. It tells an almost mythic tale of a life simply lived in the American southwest.
Father Jean Marie Latour, the novel’s main character, arrives in New Mexico in 1851 to serve as the Apostolic Vicar. He has traveled there from Sandusky, Ohio, with his friend, Joseph Vaillant, a vicar.
The novel is historically based, drawing from the life of Jean-Baptiste Lamy (1814 – 1888). The plot is inspired by the capture of the Southwest by the U.S. in the Mexican–American War, which took place from 1846 to 1848. Read More→
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