The Professor's House was published in 1925, only seven years after My Ántonia, but it is set in an America that is at least a half-century removed from its frontier past, an America that sells off its heritage while buying up the relics of European antiquity. Its protagonist, Godfrey St. Peter, might be an older version of Jim Burden. He is a man who grew up on the prairie, entered academia and in his fifties has attained professional success and what at first seems to be domestic happiness. But over the year in which the novel's events transpire--the year that follows his family's move to a new house and ends with his near-death in the old one he has refused to abandon--it becomes clear that St. Peter's success is hollow, his relations with his wife and children passionless and embittered. What meaning remains in the professor's life lies in the past, in his relationship with a gifted pupil who died young and whose discoveries have made St. Peter's family wealthy--but at an awful cost. "If Outland were here tonight," St. Peter thinks, "he might say with Mark Antony, My fortunes have corrupted honest men." [131] 

If the tone of My Ántonia is that of the romantic pastoral, The Professor's House is a bleaker--and at times even a savage--book. In place of Jim Burden's rhapsodic concluding vision, we are left with St. Peter's realization that "He had never learned to live without delight. And he would have to learn to, just as, in a Prohibition country, he supposed he would have to learn to live without sherry. Theoretically he knew that life is possible, may be even pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that." [257]