Sharon O'Brien, 'Willa Cather:  The Emerging Voice,' a Fawcett Columbine Book, published by Ballantine Books, 1988, stated first Ballantine Books edition.

Willa Cather:  The Emerging Voice is a 464 page softcover measuring 9" x 6".  The cover has light surface rubbing but no tears.  Inside, the pages are clean but tanning around the edges.  The binding is solid.  The condition is very good.

Book Summary

Though Willa Cather's great novels--O Pioneers!, My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop--are among the most cherished and popular of American classics, and Cather herself one of the most highly regarded American women writers, her life has largely remained a mystery.  In this ground-breaking biography, the first major study of Willa Cather in a quarter-century, Sharon O'Brien offers a radically new vision of Cather's early years.

Writing from a feminist perspective and drawing on key sources unavailable to previous biographers, O'Brien examines Cather's long-hidden struggle for sexual identity and artistic self-realization.  As an adolescent, Cather so strongly identified creative power with masculinity that she assumed a male persona, actually dressing as a man.  It wasn't until she accepted herself as a woman, an artist, and a lesbian that Cather found her real strength and her true voice as a novelist.

With keen insight and enormous sensitivity, O'Brien traces the drama of Willa Cather's transformation.  This is a landmark biography that will send readers back to Cather's novels with new appreciation and awareness.