The Troll Garden, and Selected Stories

Willa Cather's debut collection captures the loneliness of the Nebraska prairie and the immigrant families who carved lives from its unforgiving soil. These are stories about people who want something they can't quite reach: artists trapped in communities that neither understand nor support their longing, women suffocating in small towns, men dreaming of Paris. The opening story introduces Canute, a Norwegian immigrant living in a shanty near Rattlesnake Creek, whose heavy drinking and deeper despair mask a yearning for connection and meaning. Across these pages, Cather writes with spare, crystalline prose about the tension between artistic aspiration and harsh reality, the particular isolation of immigrant experience, and the way the land itself seems to press down on everyone who lives upon it. This is Cather finding her voice, already demonstrating the profound empathy and attention to ordinary lives that would define her greatest work.