My Ántonia
Willa Cather
Paperback
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Sept. 10, 2015)
“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.” --- Willa Cather, My Ántonia My Ántonia Willa Cather (1873 - 1947) My Ántonia tells the stories of several immigrant families who move out to rural Nebraska to start new lives in America, with a particular focus on a Bohemian family, the Shimerdas, whose eldest daughter is named Ántonia. The book’s narrator, Jim Burden, arrives in the fictional town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, on the same train as the Shimerdas, as he goes to live with his grandparents after his parents have died. Jim develops strong feelings for Ántonia, something between a crush and a filial bond, and the reader views Ántonia’s life, including its attendant struggles and triumphs, through that lens. Reception and literary significance My Ántonia was enthusiastically received in 1918 when it was first published. It was considered a masterpiece and placed Cather in the forefront of women novelists. Today, it is considered as her first masterpiece. Cather was praised for bringing the American West to life and making it personally interesting. It brought place forward almost as if it were one of the characters, while at the same time playing upon the universality of the emotions, which in turn promoted regional American literature as a valid part of mainstream literature. While interpretations vary, My Ántonia is clearly an elegy to those families who built new lives west of the Mississippi River and highlights the role of women pioneers in particular. Cather also makes a number of comments concerning her views on women's rights and there are many disguised sexual metaphors in the text. My Ántonia is a selection of The Big Read, the community-wide reading program of The National Endowment for the Arts.