Willa Cather 
The Song of the Lark (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) [EPUB ebook] 

Willa Sibert Cather was born near Winchester, Virginia, in 1873.  At the age of nine her family moved to frontier Nebraska.  Many of Willa Cathers own experiences went into The Song of the Lark: the story of a gifted girl growing up in a small western town and finding in the wide-open landscape a dazzling equivalent to her own expansive sense of self.  While attending the University of Nebraska her ambitions turned toward writing, managing the college newspaper and working as a columnist. Later, she taught high school in Pittsburgh and worked as an editor for Mc Clures. Not until age thirty-seven did Cather leave the journalistic world to pursue fiction-writing full time, becoming one of America’s major novelists.