The Professor's House

From Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather, The Professor's House is a vivid look into the domestic life of a 1920s Midwestern town and its people. Godfrey St. Peter, a professor at the unnamed Midwestern university near Lake Michigan, is preparing to move into a new home with his wife. As he looks upon the shabby house he's grown comfortable in, St. Peter muses about his life and his scholarship, philosophizing particularly on the people whom he's loved. His relationship with his wife and his daughters have become more and more strained over the years as St. Peter has alienated himself to reflect on his late student, Tom Outland. As St. Peter reminisces about Outland's brilliant scholarship and sacrifice to the Great War, St. Peter ponders how he can look forward to the future when he knows that life can only end in death. With Cather's masterful writing, her curt and concise language, and characters that are so human they come to life on the page, The Professor's House is a haunting read. Cather is known best for writing what it means to be a human whose life has been upturned, as many of her works deal with immigration and settling. There are common themes of nostalgia, exile, and a sense of not belonging in her novels, something that The Professor's House pairs with themes of philosophy, spirituality, and domesticity beautifully.