Complete and unabridged, with 59 full-page plates by Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins and John Atkinson Grimshaw. A great bridge-builder, a wife in Boston, a first love found again in London, and a cantilever span over the St Lawrence that his firm has been asked to build cheaper than it can safely be built. Cather moved to the Nebraska prairie at nine and made the homesteaders her subject; this was her first novel, and she later half-disowned it as an imitation of Henry James — which is unfair, because the bridge is entirely hers. Fifty-nine plates, from Henry Sargent to Thomas Eakins, trace the drawing rooms, dinner parties, and public spectacles of the world Cather's engineer moves through.