The Song of the Lark

The Song of the Lark is a novel by Willa Cather, first published in 1915. The second book in Cather's Great Plains trilogy, it is a portrait of an artist in formation. Thea Kronborg grows up in Moonstone, Colorado, the daughter of a Swedish Methodist minister in a large, practical family.

Her musical ability is recognized by adults including Dr. Howard Archie and the troubled teacher Wunsch. Study takes her from Moonstone to Chicago, where disciplined training reveals that her true instrument is her voice and that talent alone will not secure a life in art.

Setbacks, teachers, friendships, and the support of people she leaves behind shape Thea's progress. A period of solitude among the cliff dwellings of Arizona restores her sense of purpose, while ambition demands difficult choices about love, loyalty, and ordinary companionship.

Cather is less interested in sudden triumph than in the labor and concentration behind it. Thea's rise toward the opera stage becomes a study of artistic self-creation, attentive both to the force of vocation and to what must be relinquished in order to serve it.

"Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone. His offices were in the Duke Block, over the drug store. Larry, the doctor's man, had lit the overhead light in the waiting-room and the double student's lamp on the desk in the study."