My Ántonia

“During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had both known long ago. More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood.”

“This girl” is Ántonia Shimerda and My Ántonia is her story, told through the poignantly fond recollections of her childhood friend Jim Burden. Immigrants to the windswept, wheat-seeded prairies of Nebraska, the Shimerdas set them­selves to the task of wrestling a living from the awesome but unforgiving fields of their newfound home. As lovely as she is fiercely freehearted, Ántonia embodies the very spirit of the prairie, accepting each triumph and tribulation of maturation as they appear.

Counted as the first of Willa Cather’s many literary masterpieces, My Ántonia is a novel of rare and almost-inexpressible value. Since its publication in 1918, it has remained peerless in its beautiful, elegiac presentation of both person and place: the beautiful Ántonia Shimerda and Great Plains of North America.

Willa Cather (1873–1947) was an American writer and woman of letters whose fiction grew out of the land under her feet. Her novels include O Pioneers! (1913), My Ántonia (1918), and My Mortal Enemy (1926). Her “Catholic” novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), has been acclaimed as “illustrative of the wonder and beauty of Catholic mysteries,” and is available from Cluny.

Paperback. 266 pages.