A Lost Lady

In a small railway town on the Nebraska prairie, the elegant, charming Marian Forrester, much younger wife of the old railroad builder Captain Forrester, makes their house a place of brilliance and grace for visitors from the East, and the boy Niel Herbert worships her. But as the Captain loses his fortune and his health, and the pioneer age gives way to a meaner one of shrewd businessmen, Niel watches with dismay as Mrs Forrester, determined to survive, compromises with men he despises.

Willa Cather published the novel in 1923, and F. Scott Fitzgerald admired it so much that he wrote to her, worried that a passage in The Great Gatsby resembled one of hers. Read Cather's My Ántonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop.