num_pages: 434
description: 
  A moving tale of a woman's devotion to her art--one of Willa Cather's most autobiographical novels
Conflating her own childhood experiences with those of a celebrated Wagnerian soprano of her day, Willa Cather here introduces Thea Kronborg,a Scandinavian-American singer who rises from a one-story Colorado town to the Metropolitan Opera House. Along the way she learns her own capacity for the rigorous demands of artistic excellence, and how few of her colleagues are willing to sacrifice ordinary vanities for exacting professional standards. Exhausted and depressed by the mediocrity around her, she seeks respite in the southwestern desert, where she has the epiphany that will transform her vision and art. Characteristically, Cather uses the western landscape in The Song of the Lark both to reflect her heroine's inner live and to fire her imagination.The Song of the Lark, first published in 1915, evokes Cather's paradoxical fondness for and impatience with the small-town midwestern milieu of her childhood and illuminates her personal yearning for aesthetic transcendence."Cather makes a great romance of the loneliness of the artist's vocation."--Vivian Gornick
language: English
title: The Song of the Lark
titlecomplete: The Song of the Lark (Great Plains Trilogy, #2)
characters: Professor Wunsch, Thea Kronborg, Madison Bowers, Fred Ottenburg, Howard Archie, Andor Harsanyi, Ray Kennedy
genres: Fiction, Historical, American, Music, Literature, Classics, Novels, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Audiobook
ratings_count: 10296
places: Colorado, New York City, New York, Arizona, Denver, Colorado, Chicago, Illinois
publisher: Penguin Classics