Willa Cather
1873–1947
Biography
Willa Cather (1873–1947) was an American novelist whose books return again and again to the Great Plains and to the people who settled them. She was born in Virginia, but at the age of nine she moved with her family to Webster County, Nebraska, where they settled in the town of Red Cloud. That childhood among the open prairie, its farms, its immigrant neighbours and its harsh seasons, supplied material she drew on for the rest of her career. After graduating from the University of Nebraska she spent about a decade in Pittsburgh, working as a magazine editor and as a high school English teacher, and in her thirties she moved to New York City. New York remained her home base for the rest of her life, although she travelled widely and spent summers on Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick.
Her early novels are often read together. O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915) and My Ántonia (1918) are set in the prairie country and the western states, and they follow characters, many of them children of immigrants, as they make lives there. Her later work turned to other places and periods, and in 1923 she received the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel about a young Nebraskan who goes to fight in the First World War. Her fiction returns often to nostalgia, to exile and to the sense that a landscape can shape the people who live in it. She died in 1947, and she and Edith Lewis, her companion of nearly forty years, are buried together in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.
My Ántonia is the book on this site. It is narrated by Jim Burden, who comes as a boy to a prairie town in Nebraska and is drawn into the life of Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant girl whose family has come to farm on the plains. The novel traces their friendship over many years, through hard labour, change and loss, and it is one of the works that made Cather's picture of the frontier so widely read. Reading it alongside her other Nebraska novels shows how far she was willing to find dignity and beauty in lives that were neither wealthy nor famous.
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Books
My Ántonia
by Willa Cather
My Ántonia is a novel published in 1918 by American writer Willa Cather. The novel tells the stories of an orphaned boy from Virginia, Jim Burden, and the elder daughter in a family of Bohemian immigrants, Ántonia Shimerda, who are each brought as children to be pioneers in…
Summary from Wikipedia: My Ántonia (CC BY-SA 4.0)