My Ántonia

By Willa Cather

My Ántonia evokes the Nebraska prairie life of Willa Cather's childhood, and commemorates the spirit and courage of immigrant pioneers in America. One of Cather's earliest novels, written in 1918, it is the story of Ántonia Shimerda, who arrives on the Nebraska frontier as part of a family of Bohemian emigrants. Her story is told through the eyes of Jim Burden, a neighbor who will befriend Ántonia, teach her English, and follow the remarkable story of her life.
Working in the fields of waving grass and tall corn that dot the Great Plains, Ántonia forges the durable spirit that will carry her through the challenges she faces when she moves to the city. But only when she returns to the prairie does she recover her strength and regain a sense of purpose in life. In the quiet, probing depth of Willa Cather's art, Ántonia's story becomes a mobbing elegy to those whose persistence and strength helped build the American frontier.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Mar 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9780486114835

Willa Cather

Willa Cather (1873-1947) was an award-winning American author. As she wrote her numerous novels, Cather worked as both an editor and a high school English teacher. She gained recognition for her novels about American frontier life, particularly her Great Plains trilogy. Most of her works, including the Great Plains Trilogy, were dedicated to her suspected lover, Isabelle McClung, who Cather herself claimed to have been the biggest advocate of her work. Cather is both a Pulitzer Prize winner and has received a gold medal from the Institute of Arts and Letters for her fiction.

Reviews for My Ántonia

[jackmassa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Long ago, a grad school writing teacher recommended we read Willa Cather. It's taken me way too long to follow his advice.

This is an exquisite novel about life on the frontier and the immigrant experience in America. But mainly about love, loss, innocence, the pain of growing up, and "how much people can mean to each other."

The characters are passionate, beautifully drawn, yet consistently surprising. Cather's technique is indirect, or as she called it "unfurnished." What's left out is often more important than what's stated. The reader is left to interpret the meaning and importance of ambiguous actions and feelings.

It used to said that the late 19th Century was the Golden Age of the Novel. But I think it was the first two decades of the 20th Century when the form reached its zenith. That's when Joyce, Lawrence, and Conrad were writing books with unprecedented technical brilliance and psychological depth. In her quiet, understated way, Willa Cather was doing the same.

[zumbanista · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My Antonia by Willa Cather was well recommended to me a number of times. The last book of Cather’s Prairie Trilogy, I read the first 2 books in order to make sense of the last. So it’s taken me a number of years to finally read this book about growing up on the farms and in a small Nebraska town during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. The writing is simple and beautiful. the author’s love of the wide open spaces people by hardy Europeans shines in her every word. She has a wonderful ability to tell the stories of her characters in a comical yet compassionate way. We are in for more enjoyable adventures once Jim and his grandparents left the farm and moved to the city of Black Hawk. We quickly pass through his education and learn third hand what becomes of Antonia and others. It winds up rather quickly with a bit of sentimentality.

[asxz-2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wow. My first Willa Cather and I can't believe It's taken me so long. This was astonishing. Beautifully written with every open sky and blade of wind-blown grass innocently transcribed. The story feels familiar as Jim Burden is a prototypical Nick Carraway, condemned to observe, unable to effect change. I'm not the first to make the comparison and it appears that Fitzgerald judged his own work to be an inferior homage in some ways. Antonia is a tragic heroine, overflowing with life. are we supposed to be disappointed in her lack of success relative to Lena and Tiny, or, as I did, are we supposed to feel thrilled that she is married to a man who loves her and with whom she is bringing up 10 fabulous children? It doesn't matter much, I guess, but I am as captivated by Antonia as Jim.

I look forward to reading more of Ms Cather.

[bodachliath · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It is a daunting task to find anything fresh to say about a book that is justifiably regarded as a classic, so I will keep this one fairly short. Willa Cather moved with her family from New England to rural Nebraska as a child, at a time when new farmland there was still being pioneered, so this tale of the state's development and specifically the experiences of the first generation immigrant farming families from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia that settled it, is inevitably coloured by her own experiences. She distances herself cleverly by making her narrator Jim Burden a man of her own age who for quite a large part of the book retains some distance from its heroine Ántonia, but who was also her childhood friend and neighbour.The story is beautifully paced and contains nothing superfluous. Cather's Nebraska is vividly realised and her attitudes to her characters and particularly those who fall foul of conventional moral judgments seem very modern for a book first published in 1918. For the most part she avoids sentimentality too, except perhaps a little in the final chapter, which seems forgiveable. It was also interesting to read a story that is so positive about immigration at a time when there is so much paranoia about it in popular political culture.

[bexaplex · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I managed to get through high school without reading Willa Cather. Someone recommended My Ántonia when I was looking for undramatic material suitable for reading before bedtime, and onto the wish list it went.Undramatic is an interesting label to apply to this book, which witnesses a suicide, an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, several amputations and a murder-suicide. The tone is what makes the story drowsy and golden-hued — romantic doesn't even begin to cover it. It was indeed pleasant to read before falling asleep.This novel is a good counterpoint to House of Mirth because the two novels have some shared structure — you can sense Ántonia's "downfall" approaching her as soon as she moves to town, and the narrator is occasionally exasperatingly useless (both of which remind me of House of Mirth). Cather doesn't write straight-up tragedies, however — her characters have a remarkable amount of self-determination. What could have been a fatal flaw (e.g. Lena's warmheartedness to married men) becomes a colorful personality detail. I love that the entire farming community gossips about Ole Benson following Lena around and years later Lena casually dismisses their gossip with a description of her generosity of spirit ('There was never any harm in Ole,' she said once. 'People needn't have troubled themselves. He just liked to come over and sit on the draw-side and forget about his bad luck.' [p. 226]).

[bookheaven_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Classic about Nebraska in the 1800s.

[dominiquemarie-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"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 winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running."


This book is about the pioneer experience in Nebraska, particularly that of Eastern European immigrants, and is also the coming of age story of Jim Burden (narrator), and Ántonia. While the book is told from Jim's point of view, I felt more connected to Ántonia. Jim and Ántonia are friends from the moment they meet, and as the seasons and the landscape of Nebraska prairie change, so do Jim and Ántonia. They eventually take very different paths, but their friendship remains. Jim is a romantic, and very nostalgic about the past. Ántonia is the symbol of the past for him. I was wrapped up in his feelings of nostalgia, and longing for the past. As I was reading, I felt them too. I particularly loved his descriptions of the Nebraska prairie. 


CAWPILE Rating:

C- 9

A- 10

W- 10

P- 6

I- 9

L- 10

E- 10

Avg= 9.1= ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

#backtotheclassics (Classic from the Americas- includes the Caribbean)
#mmdchallenge (a book published before you were born)

[rdra1962 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reached back for a classic i had never read. A beautifully written book, with powerful descriptions of places, people and memories. An old-fashioned good read!

[patriciau-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

(This was read as part of my 2011 reading project, 100 Years, 100 Books, which commemorated RPL's 100th anniversary.)

My friend Paula, a Nebraska native, has been after me to read this book for years and now I understand. I’d been spending nearly all of my reading time with early 20th century mysteries and, quite frankly, they’d become tedious. After forcing myself through The Red House by A.A. Milne, I really felt like I needed a change of pace. I had downloaded a whole bunch of free books to my Kindle for this reading project, and My Antonia just happened to be at the top of the list, so I casually opened it one night a week ago to see what it was all about.

I found a beautiful, heartbreaking, luminous story that captivated me from the first page. Cather tells the story of Antonia Shimerda, a headstrong, handsome Bohemian girl whose family is transplanted to Black Hawk, Nebraska in the 19th century. Antonia’s story is told through the eyes of Jim Burden, an orphan who also arrives to live with his grandparents in Black Hawk on the same train as Antonia and her family. The two become fast friends whose lives twine around each other over the course of a lifetime.

The interesting thing about this story that is so different from what I’ve been reading is that there really isn’t a storyline. This is a memoir, a re-telling of a bucolic if hard childhood on the prairie, coming of age in a small mid-western town, and adulthood not yet devoid of childhood innocence and affection between lifelong friends.

I was reminded of two stories as I read this one – Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder and the 2010 Newbery winner Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool. The sod houses of Wilder’s early books are here, as is the red prairie grass, snakes, farms, and family devotion. The similarity to Manifest, Kansas is more in the characters drawn by Cather and Vanderpool than in the story. However, all three books share the same comforting, lovely tributes to the importance of family and friends.

Cather’s characters, from Antonia and her regal but defeated father, to the foreign farm girls who go to town as “hired girls,” to Antonia’s husband and colorful tribe of children, to the narrator – Jim Burden himself – are finely drawn and developed with care and compassion. She captures the tender friendship between Antonia and Jim, which becomes the thread that twines through the entire story and ultimately makes it successful.

A beautiful book that will stay with me for a long, long time.

[cecrow · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel reads like Laura Ingalls Wilder for grown-ups, mixing childhood nostalgia with scratching up a living in the early prairie years. It was all work at the time, but it came with its own rewards and encouraged friendliness among neighbours who needed to look out for one another when lacking most social services. It's also a good view into the immigrant experience, reminding all of us with European stock that we originally came from somewhere else and it's only a question of how far back. The novel is semi-autobiographical, featuring descriptions of the land filled with grace and style and drawn from Willa Cather's childhood memories. It was clearly a place she loved. It's a quiet novel plot-wise, but it goes a long way to extolling the virtues of unglamorous everyday lives. I've more than one LT member to thank for bringing this book to my attention. Filed among the comfort reads.

[snyderzia · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Beautiful!

[donnab317 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Beautiful story. Beatifully written.

[ctpress_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The narrator is Jim Burden - a prairie boy who moves to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. He is telling the story of himself and his friendship with Antonia, an immigrant girl from Bohemia which stretches three decades although most of it takes place in childhood. The recollection involves several settler-families on the prairie and later on in the town of Lincoln. Nothing more needs to be told about this story. It's just marvelous, entertaining and exciting. Based on Cathers own experiences moving to Nebraska as a child. It is very realistic, one doesn't want to depart with these characters - Antonia is a fascinating character torn between her new hard life in Nebraska and her old home in Bohemia. A hot-tempered girl, a survivor, resourcefull and hard-working. But personally I bonded more with the narrator himself. Admired him in his many decisions and thoughts. There's so much truth in this story, so many real human emotions and experiences told with nuance and depth. Just read it. Or better: Listen to the wonderful audiobook read by Jeff Cummings. We reached the edge of the field, where our ways parted. I took her hands and held them against my breast, feeling once more how strong and warm and good they were, those brown hands, and remembering how many kind things they had done for me. I held them now a long while, over my heart. About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women’s faces, at the very bottom of my memory.

[samsattler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Willa Cather’s My Antonia is a classic, one of the “prairie tales” for which Cather is most famous. The 1918 novel relies heavily on the author’s personal recollection of migrating to a remote section of Nebraska farmland as a small child to tell the story of Jim Burden, a little boy who made that very trek. I decided to reread this one when I was offered a copy of Barbara Bedell’s new “eNotated” version by its publisher, Classics Unbound.What makes this edition of My Antonia different from the usual run of the mill e-book versions already out there, are the dozens of links built into the text that define obscure words and references, many of which were probably more meaningful and familiar to Cather’s readers when her books were originally published than they are today. There are also links to a bibliography, illustrations, photos, an author timeline, a brief history of Nebraska, and several theme explanations. Much of this is meaningful and easy to digest (especially the definitions) within the context of the story, and I found some of the pictures included in the Nebraska history to be particularly fascinating. Most of the material, however, is best explored after completing the novel if one is to feel the emotional impact of My Antonia. Ten-year-old Jim Burden arrives at the remote farm of his grandparents not at all prepared for the isolation in which he will spend the formative years of his life. Although he does not know it, a little girl, Antonia Shimerda, and her family share the last leg of the train ride with Jim and the young man accompanying him to Nebraska. The Shimerdas and the Burdens will come to know each well as Antonia becomes a key figure in Jim’s life, always there but, somehow, still always out of his reach.Just as surprising to me as the first time I read My Antonia, this is really Jim Burden’s story, not Antonia’s. Antonia may be the title character but she disappears for much of the time, and the book is really more about how she impacts Jim’s coming-of-age experience than it is about what happens to her during her own rather harsh life. Cather excels in making her reader feel the isolation and danger faced by those who had the courage to brave an environment like the one in the Nebraska of the second half of the nineteenth century. Those early settlers were lucky to survive, much less to thrive and improve their lot from season to season. But they had the spirit and desire necessary to create a better life for themselves and their children. Life on the Nebraska prairie was definitely hard, but it rewarded the hearty souls willing to test themselves there – if they managed to survive. Bottom line: My Antonia deserves its classic status, and it is as inspiring a piece of fiction today as when it was first published. The eNotated edition is a worthy one that will be particularly helpful to students but interesting to more casual readers, as well. I like the concept and look forward to other volumes from this publisher.Rated at: 4.0

[redbudnate · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep."

[mawls · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Very descriptive novel about life in Nebraska for an immigrant family. Mostly takes place on the farm. A look into two people's lives, together and apart.

[narshkite · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a gorgeous evocation of a very particular time and place. I am pretty disappointed in myself that I have never read Willa Cather, and I will be reading more.

[pferdina · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Supposedly a portrait of the Bohemian immigrant woman, Antonia, the story is told from the perspective of Jim Burden, who moves west to Nebraska on the same day and becomes her friend. This makes the story a little odd because the reader only gets glimpses of Antonia's life on the prairie while also following Jim's life.

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was simply a beautiful book to read. Willa Cather's tale of a young daughter of Bohemian immigrants on the Nebraska frontier is a delight from beginning to end. Antonia Shimerda's life is narrated by her friend Jim Burden. The story of her growth, travails and eventual success in becoming one with the land is one of the great frontier stories of America. Willa Cather captures the spirit of the land with wonderful descriptions of the landscape and life on the frontier; and its people by capturing of the emotions of the characters. It is similar in this aspect to Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth which I first read about the same time. Cather traversed this county in several of her books including this novel which is her masterpiece.

[bherner_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed My Antonia. I chose to read it because I purchased Read This!: Handpicked Favorites from America's Indie Bookstores by Hans Weyandt and Ann Patchett and I'm using that book as guide toward things to read on my kindle. Currently reading the second book I chose using Read This!, On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry. Very entertaining.

[dtn620 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Aside from hearing the title and the author's name I knew nothing of this book prior to picking it up the other day. I did so because a number of friends were reading the book together and knew I should get in on the action. I am glad I did.

This was a wonderfully straightforward tale rendered beautifully by simple yet powerful language. It was the type of book that evoked sentimentality from me. For what though, I'm not really sure. As another reviewer (Mo) says, "i like the sense of nostalgia that permeates the book." Here is an example of that nostalgia that really struck me:

As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.

A special thanks to all the FFs who's reading it right now. I'm glad I picked this one up.

[thewanderingjew_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My Antonia, Willa Cather, Reading a classic is a more civil, more genteel experience. Gone is the fear that on any page there will be unnecessary violent bloodshed, objectionable language, distasteful sexual innuendos, repulsive descriptions and convoluted plots, to name just a few. Also gone is the unexpected startling conclusion. Events progress in a very orderly fashion and while we might not anticipate the ending, we don’t expect astonishing finales. The story is told beautifully, in a direct manner, without the use of extraneous devices or artifice to inspire the reader, instead the emphasis is on the beauty and expression of the language used. Short by today’s standards, this book is less than 300 pages. It is written for a wide age range and is often a book assigned in school for those even as young as fifth or sixth grade. Because it is not written in the often hedonistic style of many of today’s novels, it is appropriate for young and old. The one drawback of the novel for me was that it seemed almost too simplistic, too passé, perhaps not interesting enough for today’s adult reader and might be more appropriate for younger readers, who are still a little naïve, so they can learn about and understand the evolution of our country and its people. Although the story being told is realistic, the reality today is so much more complicated, that the book may seem a bit out of touch without the benefit of analysis and discussion. In some ways we have indeed moved on, but overall, we sometimes seem to be standing in the same place, perhaps a little more sophisticated but by no means, less imperfect. At the tender age of 10, Jim Burden is orphaned and sent from his home in Virginia, to Nebraska, to live with his grandparents. There he meets Antonia, from Bohemia. Although she speaks no English and is four years his elder, a deep abiding friendship soon develops between them. The story is told by Jim Burdon, in the form of his memoir, but it basically is the story of Antonia through his eyes.Antonia is the embodiment of the strong, capable member of the pioneer family. The love of the land and its conquest motivates them. Although their lives are hard, they embrace it, bearing children, suffering hardships of climate, mortgages, ruined crops and failure and even, unfaithful spouses. Cather gives most of her immigrant female characters independent personalities at a time when the difference in class and station was highly evident and emphasized. The upper class women sat at home, perhaps doing their needlepoint. Exertion was considered unseemly. Yet, the farm girls worked the land or worked for families in town doing chores and performing menial labor. In reality they had more freedom of expression and freedom of choice to find their futures. For the sophisticated, refined woman, life consisted mainly of the hearth and home and proper decorum.The novel is easy to read. There are no extra words or confusing extraneous tangents. The reader will find the rather uncomplicated characters endearing with their homespun, earthy, personalities coupled with the real and touching experiences they endure at the turn of the 20th century. Although life was simpler than, immigrants and early pioneers suffered from the most of the same problems society faces today. The relationship of married partners, family members and friends is explored. Loyalty, ambition and greed, class distinction and prejudice, inequality for women, and even enduring hope and fulfillment of one’s dreams, are themes which are also visited in this book. This is a story of life, of survival, of accommodation to hardship. It is not exciting like the modern books of today, but it is beautiful literature about real people and their choices, how they lived and how they died, what they held important and what they held dear.

[mikedraper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a classical story that tells of an immigrant family of farmers who migrate to Nebraska to start a new life. On the train with the family is young Jim Burden who is going to Nebraska to live with his grandparents after his parents's death.Jim narrates the story and the family, the Shimerda's have extra difficulty because no one speaks their language. The only person who speaks in a similar language, takes advantage of them.Antonia is their teenage daughter and has the street sense to help the family in many situations. She and Jim form a relationship that lasts throughout the novel.The elements that help classify this as a classic include the descriptions of life in rural Nebraska, the difficulty of immigrants in a new land, the relationships with the neighbors and the farming community and family relationships. We also see the two teenagers, Jim and Antonia, and how Antonia overcomes various obstacles.This was my second reading of the story. The first when I was a teenager and reading it again as an adult brought a new light to the novel and added entertainment.

[becky221_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wonderful description of farm life in the Midwest and relationships forged during shared hardships. I especially enjoyed the passage where the narrator and Antonia remembered her father later on in the book- very beautiful!

[librarian1204 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It took me too many years to finally read this book. I had a different story in mind. This was wonderful. Strong women.

[khiemstra631 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A prairie classic that is great for book discussion groups.

[mmignano11 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For Cather, My Antonia was very much based on real life experience. She had a friend as a young girl, who was an immigrant hired girl, and she visited her when they were both adults and her friend was married with a large family, similar to Jim's visit to Antonia. Although, Cather was successful at that time, she felt the loss deeply of a relationship that had recently ended with Isabelle McClung, the love of her life, who became engaged to a concert violinist. She returned to her home town, Red Cloud Nebraska for 3 months to mourn the loss. It seems that Antonia and Jim's relationship mirrors Cather's feelings of failure in her personal life, but success in her professional life. Jim recognizes Antonia's contentment with her place in her life, and ultimately feels that sense of fulfillment, by the end of the book, after visiting with her.Many parts of the book are based on truth, such as the story of the wolves and many of the people who played a part in My Antonia, were people Cather knew, the Harlings were really the Miners, neighbors of the Cathers. There was that feeling, to me, that Cather was trying to impart something that struck a chord deep within her, and I think that is because she was basing so much of the story on experiencs that she had and people she knew. The story of the Cutter suicide which seems so innocuous at that point in the story was based on a loan shark Cather knew of who was cruel to his wife, throughout their marriage and finally shot her and killed himself. Just as in life it would have seemed so random and strange, it was when plunked into the story during Jim's visit. Cather's skill lay in bringing the story to light at just the right time, for the fascination of Antonia's children and the entertainment of Jim, who later checks on the facts of the story with another lawyer. I loved the last line, by Jim "Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past."

[y2ash · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a bit of a cheat because I already read this book. However, it was when I was 10. I figured I missed all of the subtle complexities of My Antonia but I didn't. I still feel the same way that I felt before.

The narrator is a lawyer named Jim Burden who decides to write a book about his old friend Antonia Shimerda, who is originally from Bohemia, and his life in Nebraska. There are bumps in their friendship as their lives take very different paths.

Jim is unlike all of the children his age and of his time. He is very thoughtful, reflective, and smart. He continues with his academics by going to college and establishing himself in New York City. Antonia, though very smart, gets swindled by man who promises to marry her but then deserts her and leaves her pregnant.

Antonia, after moving to Oregon, moves back to Nebraska. A couple of years later, she meets Cuzak, another implant from Bohemia. They later married and have a whole bunch of children. Jim and Antonia meet about 20 years later. The friendship is still just as strong.

I never believed Antonia made such an impact that she warrant a book written about her. She is a strong enough character. She never gave up even after her father's suicide or after being deserted. Antonia has a certain amount of endurance that was needed to survive those times or to survive life. However, I like the accuracy of the pioneer life and immigrants making their way in a new world. As an end note, I would never like Mrs. Shimerda.

[krumbs_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

She makes the Midwest seem exotic!

[michellech_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Bittersweet.

Antonia is a bit reckless and completely likable. Her family is from Bohemia (I confess that I had to look up what region this is/was) and settles in a new country with few possessions but a strong work ethic. Every member of her family is strong and opinionated. Her mother is outspoken, bold and really rather funny.

Cather focuses on the settlement of the Midwest and picks a strong set of characters to follow. The story is told from Jim's viewpoint and is based on his memories. There is a nice mixture of personalities and back stories to follow. Jim is a young boy when he first meets Antonia and her family, and despite the language barrier, he is immediately drawn in and they spend many of their days together. I loved this part of the book and enjoyed watching Antonia learn about the culture and language of her new home. She is innocent, lovely and a hard worker. It reminded me of those times in life that are so wonderful but go by really fast.

Jim and Antonia over the years take very different paths which always seem to intersect. Ultimately I wanted to see them married and living happily ever after. They share memories and a very innocent time in their lives. I wanted to know them and be there too!

I listened to the audiobook version by Patrick Lawlor which was very well done. This was my first Cather novel and I enjoyed it very much. My only criticism is that although it was written in a completely different era, some of the racist attitudes were a bit much.