My Antonia

The final novel in Willa Cather's acclaimed Great Plains Trilogy, that includes O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark.

With an Introduction by Sara Wheeler

Jim Burden, a young orphan sent to live with relatives in Nebraska, grows up alongside Bohemian immigrant Ántonia Shimerda. But while their childhoods are shared, their paths soon diverge, spurred on by the effects of dire poverty on the Shimerda family.

Cather’s novel was met with instant acclaim: in it she paints a portrait of the beautiful, unforgiving Nebraskan landscape and honours the lives of ordinary people during a pivotal era in American history.

About the Author

Willa Cather (née Wilella Sibert Cather) was born in 1873 near Winchester, Virginia. She moved with her family to Catherton, Nebraska in 1883, and the landscape went on to have a formative effect on her, with her most famous novels being set on Nebraskan soil. Before becoming a full-time writer, Cather worked variously as a journalist, a magazine editor and a teacher. Her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, was published in 1912, followed by titles including O Pioneers! (1913); The Song of the Lark (1915); My Ántonia (1918); One of Ours (1922), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize; Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940).

She died at her home in New York in 1947.