My Ántonia

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Summary

The final novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is a celebration of the American midwest with Cather's strongest heroine at its heart

Jim and Ántonia meets as children in the wide open plains of Nebraska at the end of the nineteenth century. Jim leaves for college and a career in the east, while Ántonia stays at home, dedicating herself to her farm and family. As the years roll by, Jim will come to view Ántonia as the embodiment of the prairie itself - tough, spirited and enduring, despite the hardness and loneliness of pioneer life. Willa Cather's beautiful novel is a celebration of the Nebraskan prairie she loved she much, and a powerful depiction of a pivotal era in the making of America.

Reviews

One of the warmest, most quietly rousing books that I know; a clear-eyed salute to the resilience of the human spirit and the innate hardiness of the immigrants who came across the ocean to start afresh in the golden west
Guardian, Xan Brooks

About the author

Willa Cather

WILLA CATHER (1873-1947) was born in Virginia and was about nine years old when her family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska. After graduating from the University of Nebraska, she worked for the Nebraska State Journal, then moved to Pittsburgh and finally to New York City. There she joined McClure’s magazine. After meeting the author Sarah Orne Jewett, she decided to quit journalism and devote herself full time to fiction. Her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, appeared in 1912, but her place in American literature was established with her first Nebraska novel, O Pioneers! published in 1913, followed by her most famous pioneer novel, My Antonia, in 1918. In 1922 she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours. Her other novels include Shadows on the Rock, The Song of the Lark, The Professor’s House, My Mortal Enemy, and Lucy Gayheart. She died in 1947.

INTRODUCER BIOGRAPHY
NICHOLAS GASKILL is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at Oriel College. He is the author of Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color and editor of the The Lure of Whitehead.

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