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Audiobooks Narrated by Laurel Leftkow
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Willa Sibert Cather had Welsh ancestry but like her parents Charles and Mary, was born in Virginia, on 7th December 1873. Despite strong roots in the community, Willa was 9, when the family moved to Nebraska, to work the rich soil and avoid TB of which there were numerous outbreaks in Virginia. The vastness and drama of the Nebraska prairie and its' extreme weather conditions as well as the many diverse cultures of the local families proved to be a major influence on her and can be evidenced in much of her later writing. Her first writing was for the local journal when she was at the University of Nebraska and later became the managing editor of the student newspaper. In 1896 she obtained work for a woman's magazine in Pittsburgh and soon after became a regular contributor to the Pittsburgh Leader and wrote poetry and short stories for the Library, another local publication. Her first collection of short stories, 'The Troll Garden', was published in 1905 and contains several of her most famous including 'A Wagner Matinee' and 'Paul's Case.' As a writer Cather was now taking immense strides forward. Between 1913 and 1918 Cather wrote her Prairie Trilogy: 'O Pioneers!', 'The Song of the Lark', and 'My Ántonia' and in 1922 the Pulitizer Prize was hers for her novel 'One of Ours' set during WWI. Acknowledged as one of America's greatest writers' further honours flowed. In 1943 she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The following year Cather received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. A determinedly private person, Cather destroyed many old drafts, personal papers, and letters. Her will would also restrict the ability of scholars to quote from personal papers that remained.On 24th April 1947, Willa Siebert Cather died of a cerebral haemorrhage at her Manhattan home. She was 73.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died. Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained.His intelligence and talent was recognised from an early age, with his first story, about a detective being published in the school magazine when he was just 13. In 1913 he enrolled at Princeton but his devotion to his own literary pursuits resulted in him leaving and, rather bizarrely, joining the Army. In 1918, stationed at Fort Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama he met and became infatuated and then inseparable from Zelda Sayre. Initially though she refused to marry him but with the success of 'This Side of Paradise', the fame and the flow of money enabled them both to begin a gilded life. For them this was The Jazz Age. For Fitzgerald he was already an alcoholic.He continued to write with great mastery and the titles of his novels and many of his 164 short stories are household names. The Great Gatsby, often cited as The Great American Novel was published to mixed reviews. As America moved from the Great Depression to the slaughter of the Second World War his works and himself were seen as far too entwined with the decadent twenties. The world had moved on and he hadn't. Further tragedy was never far from his life. Zelda after years of erratic and now intolerable behaviour was committed to an institution in 1936. His own sales began to decline and he became a hack for hire in Hollywood, dependent on increasing amounts of booze and the weekly pay check. His drunken state had often resulted in arrest or hospitalisation, further imperiling his talents. Despite his contribution to many MGM films he received only one credit.The end came all too soon for one of America's greatest ever writers. On 21st December 1940, at only 44 years of age in Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald succumbed to a heart attack.His classic 'Bernice Bobs Her Hair' carefully pulls apart the relationship between two cousins one hot summer. Something has to give and with Fitzgerald its an absolute certainty that the brittle lives of young women finally snap in unique ways.
