One of Ours is a novel by Willa Cather. It tells the story of the life of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska native around the turn of the 20th century. Claude, working on the family farm, and married to a woman who is more interested in her missionary work, than she is in him, tires of his monotonous life. When his wife leaves for China, he decides to enlist in the US Army, which has just begun preparing to enter the First World War. Claude believes that he has finally found his purpose in life, a place where he matters. Alexander's Bridge is the first novel by Willa Cather. First published in 1912, it was re-released with an author's preface in 1922. Bartley Alexander is a construction engineer and world-renowned builder of bridges undergoing a mid-life crisis. Although married to Winifred, Bartley resumes his acquaintance with a former lover, Hilda Burgoyne, in London. The affair gnaws at Bartley's sense of propriety and honor. Willa Sibert Cather (1873 – 1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.

"Engineer Bartley Alexander appears to have a happy life in Boston with a successful career and a beautiful wife. He has been commissioned to design the Moorlock Bridge in Canada, the most important project of his career. With the onset of middle age, however, he grows increasingly restless and discontented, so much so that while in London he recklessly reignites a love affair with the sweetheart of his youth, the Irish actress Hilda Borgoyne. Although the tryst allows Alexander to recapture an element that has been missing from his pedestrian life, the relationship torments his sense of morality and eventually proves disastrous. Alexander's Bridge explores the demands of Gilded Age society on the individual, as well as the capacity of the individual to violate his own standards of integrity." "This Willa Cather Scholarly Edition provides a new framework for Cather's debut novel. The novel is edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association and presents the full range of biographical, historical, and textual information now available, complete with illustrations and maps."--BOOK JACKET.

Bartley Alexander, a construction engineer, is a middle-aged man torn between Winifred, his demanding American wife, and Hilda Burgoyne, his alluring British mistress. Alexander's relationship with Hilda erodes his sense of honor and eventually proves disastrous when a bridge he is constructing begins to collapse. Alexander's Bridge is an instructive, thought-provoking study of a man's growing awareness of his loss of integrity. Newly designed and typeset in a modern 6-by-9-inch format by Waking Lion Press.

Alexander's Bridge is a work by Willa Cather now brought to you in this new edition of the timeless classic.

Willa Cather's first published novel, set in Boston, London, and Paris, is the story of a man unable to resolve the contradictions in his own nature. The central figures are Bartley Alexander, a world-famous engineer; his wife; Winifred, a Boston society matron; and his former love, Hilda Burgoyne, a London actress. Long considered an uncharacteristic production, in the light of recent scholarship "Alexander's Bridge" is seen to be closely linked to the body of Cather's work, thematically as well as in its use of myth and symbol. Bernice Slote's introduction considers the circumstances of its composition and its relationship to the later novels, particularly "One of Ours," "The Professor's House," and "Lucy Gayheart." The text has been entirely reset from the first (1912) edition.

Alexander's Bridge was Willa Cather's first novel. It was originally published in 1912, then released a second time in 1922 after Cather had established her repuation. The second edition contained an author's preface. The book is about Bartley Alexander, a world-famous bridge designer, who struggles with integrity and infedility issues as he carries on an affair with his former lover, Hilda Burgoyne. Wilella Sibert Cather (1873 - 1947) is an eminent author from the United States. She is perhaps best known for her depictions of U.S. life in novels such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Other Books of Willa Cather: Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) Pioneers! (1913) My Ántonia (1918) One of Ours (1923) Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) The Song of the Lark (1915) The Professor's House (1925) The Troll Garden and Selected Stories (1905) Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920) Not Under Forty (1936)

Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston. He had lived there as a student, but for twenty years and more, since he had been Professor of Philosophy in a Western university, he had seldom come East except to take a steamer for some foreign port. Wilson was standing quite still, contemplating with a whimsical smile the slanting street, with its worn paving, its irregular, gravely colored houses, and the row of naked trees on which the thin sunlight was still shining. The gleam of the river at the foot of the hill made him blink a little, not so much because it was too bright as because he found it so pleasant. The few passers-by glanced at him unconcernedly, and even the children who hurried along with their school-bags under their arms seemed to find it perfectly natural that a tall brown gentleman should be standing there, looking up through his glasses at the gray housetops.