The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
My Ántonia

My Ántonia

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

Novels by Willa CatherAlexander's Bridge 1912 O Pioneers! 1913 The Song of the Lark 1915 My Ántonia 1918 One of Ours 1922 A Lost Lady 1923 The Professor's House 1925 My Mortal Enemy 1926 Death Comes for the Archbishop 1927 Shadows on the Rock 1931 Lucy Gayheart 1935 Sapphira and the Slave Girl 1940
Short Fiction

The Troll Garden 1905 Youth and the Bright Medusa 1920 Obscure Destinies 1932 The Old Beauty and Others 1948 Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction, 1892-1912 1965 Uncle Valentine and Other Stories: Willa Cather's Uncollected Short Fiction, 1915-1929 1972



Introducer Biography: Elaine Showalter is the author of the recent ground-breaking study of American women writers, A Jury of Her Peers, and the classic A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more