My Antonia
About this ebook
'She is undoubtedly one of the twentieth century's greatest American writers' OBSERVER
' ... a clear-eyed salute to the resilience of the human spirit and the innate hardiness of the immigrants' XAN BROOKS, GUARDIAN
'Willa Cather was a wordsmith of enormous talent' ROBERT SLAYTON, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
'During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had both known long ago. More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood . . . His mind was full of her that day. He made me see her again, feel her presence, revived all my old affection for her.'
My Antonia is the unforgettable story of an immigrant woman's life on the Nebraska plains, seen through the eyes of her childhood friend, Jim Burden. The beautiful, free-spirited, wild-eyed girl captured Jim's imagination long ago and haunts him still, embodying for him the elemental spirit of the American frontier.
In this powerful and astonishing novel, Willa Cather created one of the most winning yet thoroughly convincing heroines in American fiction.
About the author
Born in 1873 to a family who had farmed in Virginia for generations, Willa Cather moved to her father's new ranch in Nebraska when she was eight. The raw frontier territories and the pioneer life of the Old West were to awaken her imagination and furnish the atmosphere for much of her later work. After graduating from the University of Nebraska, Willa Cather became a teacher and a journalist. In 1912 she abandoned journalism to write full time. Her first novel was Alexander's Bridge (1912) though she had already published a volume of poems and another of short stories. Her vivid novels cover a wide range: there are impassioned and thoughtful explorations of the ancient worlds of the Americas in The Professor's House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) as well as sympathetic portrayals of conflicting values, or of the demands of art. These, along with her evocations of the pioneering West, soon established her reputation as one of America's foremost writers. Willa Cather died in New York in 1947.
