The Song of the Lark
Willa Cather · 1915 CE · Novel · Modern / American · Modernist
The doctor of Moonstone, Colorado, is the first to notice that the Swedish preacher's daughter has something the town has no use for, and a drunken piano teacher who was once somebody in Leipzig gives Thea Kronborg the rudiments before she is sent to Chicago on borrowed money. Voice lessons show her what she has been reaching toward; a summer alone among the cliff-dweller ruins of an Arizona canyon shows her what it will cost, and the pursuit of it strips away the town, the people who paid for it and most of what she was. Willa Cather thought the book overfull and cut it back in later editions, but it stayed the fullest account she wrote of how a talent is made.
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