Alexander's Bridge

As the eminent American author Willa Cather herself admitted, Alexander’s Bridge “is not the story of a bridge and how it was built, but of a man who built bridges.” And significantly, an American man. Early in the novel we are introduced to an English acquaintance of Bartley Alexander who liked him “because he was an engineer.  He had preconceived ideas about everything, and his idea about Americans was that they should be engineers or mechanics.” This can be read therefore as a judgment on American masculinity—this was Cather’s first novel in 1912 and in light of her later writings,… show more.