Alexander's Bridge

Bartley Alexander, a famous, energetic American engineer at the height of his career, is building the longest cantilever bridge in the world across the St Lawrence River in Canada. Happily married in Boston, he meets again in London the Irish actress Hilda Burgoyne, whom he loved in his youth, and is torn between his two lives, while the great bridge, designed with too thin a margin of safety, rises over the river.

Willa Cather published her first novel in 1912, inspired partly by the real collapse of the Quebec Bridge in 1907. It is a short, elegant tragedy, very different from her later prairie novels, O Pioneers! and My Ántonia.