His immersion in nature gives him a feeling of complete happiness. At first, Jim feels erased by the immense natural environment of Nebraska, but soon he experiences a new lightness and freedom on the prairie. Jim is astonished by the vast prairie landscape, the endless tall red grass, and the absence of the markers of civilization, fences and fields, to which he is accustomed.
A family of Bohemian immigrants, the Shimerdas, who have recently arrived in America, is also aboard the train and headed to the same destination. Book 1 of Jim’s narrative opens with his first train ride from Virginia to Black Hawk, Nebraska, as a newly orphaned 10-year-old boy, accompanied by a young farmhand, Jake Marpole: Jim is moving to the Midwestern prairie to live with his paternal grandparents on their farm. After losing contact with Ántonia many years ago, Jim has recently renewed his friendship with her, which inspires him to try to write his childhood recollections entitled “My Ántonia.” He promises to allow his fellow train passenger to read the manuscript when he finishes writing it in New York, which he does. They vividly recall a Bohemian (Czech) immigrant girl, Ántonia, who symbolizes the pioneering conditions of their youth. Both the narrator and Jim now reside in New York, but they grew up in the same Nebraskan prairie town Jim is now a lawyer for a Western railroad company. The novel begins with an unnamed narrator unexpectedly encountering a childhood friend, Jim Burden, aboard a train crossing Iowa. This guide is based on the 1918 Houghton Mifflin edition.Ĭontent Warning: This guide contains discussions of suicide and sexual assault that are present in the source text. Other notable books authored by Cather include A Lost Lady (1923) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).
Cather won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her World War I novel One of Ours (1922).
Known for her novels’ powerful sense of place, Cather elevated regional literature into the mainstream and created heroic portrayals of the often scorned hard-toiling European immigrants.
My Ántonia is considered one of Cather’s most outstanding novels for its encapsulation of the pioneer experience on the Nebraskan frontier. The other two books, O Pioneers! (1913) and The Song of the Lark (1915) also feature strong female characters from immigrant families in a Great Plains setting but are otherwise unrelated. My Ántonia, first published in 1918, is the third novel in what reviewers sometimes refer to as “The Prairie Trilogy” or “The Great Plains Trilogy” by celebrated American author Willa Cather (1873-1947).
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