‘As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is
the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of
wine-stains…And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed,
somehow, to be running.’
My Antonia (1918) depicts the pioneering period of European settlement on the
tall-grass prairie of the American midwest, with its beautiful yet terrifying
landscape, rich ethnic mix of immigrants and native-born Americans, and
communities who share life’s joys and sorrows. Jim Burden recounts his memories
of Antonia Shimerda, whose family settle in Nebraska from Bohemia. Together
they share childhoods spent in a new world. Jim leaves the prairie for college
and a career in the east, while Antonia devotes herself to her large family and
productive farm. Her story is that of the land itself, a moving portrait of
endurance and strength.
Described on publication as ‘one of the best [novels] that any American has
ever done’, My Antonia paradoxically took Cather out of the rank of provincial
novelists as the same time that it celebrated the provinces, and mythologized a
period of American history that had to be lost before its value could be
understood.
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