The Professor's House

The Professor's House (1925) by Willa Cather is a novel in three parts. The book follows Godfrey St. Peter, an author and professor, struggling with grief, conflict, and change within his family after the death of a beloved student and his daughter's ex-fiancé, Tom Outland. The events of the book are precipitated by the professor moving from the house where he wrote a series of novels, which were inspired by Tom Outland's adventures in New Mexico. Cather wrote this novel over the course of many years, writing the middle section first and then the first and last sections afterward as a continuation of the original plot.

The book begins with Godfrey and his wife moving to a new house, which stirs up old memories for Godfrey. He decides to keep the study in his old house despite the move, in an effort to preserve some element of his old life. Godfrey's two daughters have grown and married, and Godfrey now has to navigate both an empty home and two new sons-in-law, one of whom Godfrey is in conflict with over the rights to a patent that made his daughter Rosamond an enormous amount of money. When Cather introduces Godfrey he is deeply depressed and in the midst of a mid-life crisis which causes him to wonder whether life is worth living anymore.

Godfrey is a professor at Hamilton, a small Midwestern college; much of the first part of the novel discusses his and his family's grief over the loss of Tom Outland during the first World War. Godfrey met Tom when he was a student at Hamilton, and Tom eventually became engaged to Godfrey's daughter. Tom developed a patent for a new type of plane engine that would revolutionize air travel. Tom was killed before he could create a prototype of the engine, and he left the patents to his wife-to-be, Rosamond. After Tom's death, Rosamond marries and her husband, Louie Marcellus, develops Tom's engine and sells it for an enormous amount of money. Rosamond changes after the family acquires such a large amount of wealth, and she, Louie, and Godfrey are in frequent conflict over whether or not Tom was given due credit for his invention, and to whom the money rightfully belongs.



The second part of the novel dives into a recollection of Tom's adventures in New Mexico, where a cattle herding job with a friend leads him to discover the ruins of an ancient civilization in the nearby cliffs. Tom travels to Washington to try to convince an archaeologist to investigate, but before he can persuade anyone to visit, his colleague Rodney sells off many of the artifacts to a German. Tom and Rodney have a falling out, and Tom decides to move to go to college at Hamilton, where he meets Godfrey. Godfrey is amazed by Tom's moral character and his intelligence, but before Tom can reach his full potential he is shipped off to fight in the Great War, and he dies in combat.

The last part of the novel is the most intimate portrayal of grief. While his family is away on an extended European vacation, Godfrey stays behind to work. He is editing Tom's journals in his old study, and while he is working, he is nearly killed by a gas leak in the house. Godfrey is rescued by the family's long-time seamstress and an old, steadfast friend, Augusta. The near-death experience causes Godfrey to realize that he doesn't want to live anymore, but with Augusta's guidance and support he decides that he should go on with his life.

Willa Cather was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose work was resurrected by the feminist movement in the 1970s and 1980s and became a significant part of the American literary canon thereafter, though Cather died in 1947. She has since been inducted to many halls of fame, including the New York Writers Hall of Fame and the National Women's Hall of Fame. Her more famous works were My Antonia and One of Ours, which won the Pulitzer in 1923. The Professor's House has been widely ignored by critics, many of whom view the novel as disjointed because of the way the story is broken into dissonant pieces.



Like F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Cather's protagonist Godfrey St. Peter is concerned with two opposing views of the world immediately following World War I. Godfrey feels an attachment to Tom Outland's sense of ethics, creation, and invention, without money or fame, but also sees the benefits and value of his son-in-law Marcellus's marketing skills and drive to acquire wealth. The novel also deals extensively with the emotional, economic, and social repercussions of grief and lost life, a theme common to the literature of this time.