The Professor’s House

Professor Godfrey St. Peter has finished the great work of his career and finds, unsettled, that he no longer wants the life it bought him. A new house, his daughters’ prosperous marriages, and the money flowing from a dead student’s invention all feel like intrusions. He retreats to the cramped attic study where he did his best thinking, drawn back to the memory of Tom Outland, a gifted young man whose discoveries on a mesa in the Southwest and whose death in the war still shadow the family. Cather sets a quiet domestic drama against a luminous story within a story, asking what a person owes the ambitions of youth once they have hardened into comfort. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.