The Professor’s House

’I knew at once I had come upon the city of some extinct civilization, hidden away in this inaccessible mesa for centuries’

The Professor’s House (1925) depicts the mid-life crisis of Godfrey St. Peter, a history professor at a midwestern state university who is disillusioned with his wife and daughters, his university, and the materialism of American culture. He longs for Tom Outland, his most brilliant student, who died on a World War I battlefield. At the same time, Tom’s recollection of discovering hidden cliff dweller ruins in New Mexico interrupt Godfrey’s narrative. Cather’s own experiences of travel in the Southwestern US with her partner, Edith Lewis, shadow and enrich her depictions of Tom’s New Mexican experiences.

Cather’s sixth novel is a compelling modernist work of art that raises questions that are still compelling a century later. What is the purpose of a university education? Are the sacrifices of war worth the outcome? To whom do the American past and the country’s future belong? A daring experiment in form, the novel is haunted by war and love.

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Willa Cather

Melissa J. Homestead is Professor of English and Program Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she directs the Cather Project and is co-editor of The Complete Letters of Willa Cather. She has published widely on American women’s writing and authorship, including American Women Authors and Literary Property (2005) and The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis (2021).