My Antonia [Paperback]

Beloved American novelist Willa Cather’s nostalgic classic about life on the Midwest prairie.

Emigrating from Bohemia to Black Hawk, Nebraska, with her family, Ántonia discovers no white-framed farmhouse or snug barn. Instead, the cultured Shimerda family finds itself huddled in a primitive sod house buffeted by the ceaselessly blowing winds on the Midwest prairie. For her childhood friend Jim Burden, Ántonia comes to embody the elemental spirit of this frontier. Working alongside men, she survives without compromising the rich, deep power of her nature. And Willa Cather’s lush descriptions of the rolling Nebraska grasslands interweave with the blossoming of a woman in the early days of the twentieth century in a novel that is an epic chronicle of America’s past. The novel Cather herself considered her best,My Ántoniais one of those rare, highly prized works of great literature that not only enriches its readers but immerses them in a tale superbly told.

With an Introduction by Marilyn Sides
and an Afterword by Terese Svoboda“No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful asMy Ántonia. It is the finest thing of its sort ever done in America.”—H. L. Mencken 

“Can one name another American novel whose emotional quality is so true, so warm, so human as that ofMy Ántonia.”—Clifton Fadiman 

“To reread Cather is to rediscover an arresting chapter in the national past.”—Los Angeles Times 

“The time will come when she'll be ranked above Hemingway.”—Leon EdelWilla Cather (1873–1948) was born in Winchester, Virginia. Her family moved to Nebraska before she was ten. During her teens she learned both Latin and Greek; she graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1895. She then taught high school, worked lãÇ