Willa Cather (1873-1947) was born in Virginia and raised on a Nebraska ranch. She isknown for her beautifully evocative short stories and novels about the American West. Cather became the managing editor for McClure's Magazine in 1906 and lived for forty years in New York City with her companion Edith Lewis. In 1922 Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, the story of a Western boy in World War I. In 1933 she was awarded the Prix Femina Americaine ""for distinguished literary accomplishments."" John J. Murphy (1898-1981) was a prolific and widely admired New Thought minister and writer, best known for his motivational classic, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, an international bestseller since it first blazed onto the self-help scene. His pamphlet How to Attract Money first appeared in 1955, and likewise entered many editions. Murphy wrote widely on the auto-suggestive and metaphysical faculties of the human mind and is considered one of the pioneering voices of affirmative-thinking philosophy.
No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My �ntonia. -H. L. Mencken The time will come when Willa Cather will be ranked above Hemingway. -Leon Edel