Uprooted from a well-ordered life in Virginia when she was nine, Willa Cather came of age in the West during the last years of the American frontier. She developed a love for the beauty of the open grassland and an abiding interest in the Old World customs of her neighbors, the dreamers and builders who inhabit her fiction. This collection includes work from the early part of Cather′s career and clearly marks themes and landscapes that she would detail and explore for the remainder of her life.

Alongside THE BOHEMIAN GIRL, Harper Perennial will publish the short fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, and Oscar Wilde to be packaged in a beautifully designed, boldly colorful boxset in the aim to attract contemporary fans of short fiction to these revered masters of the form. Also, in each of these selections will appear a story from one of the new collections being published in the "Summer of the Short Story." A story from Lydia Peelle′s forthcoming collection, REASONS FOR AND ADVANTAGES OF BREATHING, will be printed at the back of this volume.