The Professor's House

Godfrey St Peter, a historian at a Midwestern university, has won a prize for his great work on the Spanish explorers of America and moved with his family into a fine new house, but he cannot bring himself to leave his shabby study in the attic of the old rented house where he wrote it. Around him his family grows rich from the invention of his brilliant dead student, Tom Outland, and in the middle of the novel Tom's own story is told: his discovery of an ancient cliff city hidden in a mesa in the Southwest.

Willa Cather published the novel in 1925, comparing its structure, with a story set inside a story, to a Dutch painting of a room with a window open on to the sea. It is a quiet study of loneliness and middle age. It pairs well with The Song of the Lark and A Lost Lady.