Willa Cather My Antonia: Unabridged Text with Introduction, Biography and Analysis

Willa Cather (1873 -1947) was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Despite this critical opposition to her work, Cather remained a popular writer whose novels and short story collections continued to sell well. In 1931 Shadows on the Rock was the most widely read novel in the US, and Lucy Gayheart became a bestseller in 1935. Although Cather began her writing career as a journalist, she made a distinction between journalism, which she saw as being primarily informative, and literature, which she saw as an art form. Cather's work is often marked by its nostalgic tone, her subject matter and themes drawn from memories of her early years on the American plains.