The Professor's House

The Professor's House (1925) is Willa Cather's seventh novel, a quietly devastating exploration of middle-aged disillusionment and the conflict between material success and spiritual fulfillment.

Professor Godfrey St. Peter, a distinguished historian at a Midwestern university, has just completed his life's work — an eight-volume history of the Spanish explorers in North America. His family has moved into a new, grander house, but St. Peter clings to his cramped old study, reluctant to leave behind the space where he did his best thinking. As his wife and daughters grow absorbed in the social ambitions that his son-in-law's sudden wealth has unleashed, St. Peter withdraws into memory.

At the novel's center is "Tom Outland's Story" — an embedded narrative in which a former student recounts his discovery of an ancient cliff city in the mesas of New Mexico, an episode inspired by the real cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde. This luminous inset tale, one of the most celebrated passages in American fiction, stands in sharp contrast to the compromises and disappointments of the Professor's present life.

The novel was included in the Modern Library's list of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century.