Cather accompanied a local doctor on house calls and by her thirteenth birthday had adopted the outward appearance and manner of a male. She took intense pleasure in riding her pony to neighboring farms and listening to the stories of the immigrant farm women she met there. Cather remembered vividly both the trauma of leaving a hill farm for a flat, empty land and the subsequent excitement of growing up in the new country. Her father tried farming but soon settled the family in Red Cloud, Nebraska, a town of approximately 2,500 people. This area would serve as the inspiration for several of her novels, including My Ántonia (1918). In 1884, her family moved to join her father's relatives among the ethnically diverse settlers of the Great Plains. Author Biographyīorn in Virginia in 1873, Willa Cather spent the first decade of her life on her family's farm in Back Creek Valley. Although contemporary reviewers sometimes faulted the author's work as overly nostalgic and obsessed with the past, today critics see Cather's Nebraska novels, and My Ántonia in particular, as well-crafted, sympathetic portrayals of the uniquely American experience of immigrant pioneers. Her reputation has continued to grow since her death in 1947. Since its appearance, Cather's carefully crafted fiction has gathered a steady following. My Ántonia is widely considered the best of the author's 'Nebraska' novels which reflect her childhood experiences growing up on the plains. Through her, Cather celebrates the vitality and fruitfulness of the pioneering era as a type of lost paradise. This portrait of Ántonia is widely acknowledged as one of the most memorable characters in twentieth-century literature. Jim, a successful well-traveled and cultured East-coast lawyer, remains romantic, nostalgic, and unfulfilled in life.

Ántonia survives her father's suicide, hires herself out as household help, is abandoned at the altar, gives birth out of wedlock, but achieves fulfillment in her marriage to a Czech farmer, her loving children, and their flourishing farm. Their wildly differing places in the social hierarchy account for their respective fortunes. The story is told as Jim relates his own image of Ántonia in a nostalgic re-creation of his childhood and youth.

Willa Cather's My Ántonia (1918) is the story of both Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant to the state of Nebraska in the 1880s, and the novel's American-born narrator, Jim Burden.

My antonia book cover