My Antonia

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Willa Cather

Bantam Classics, New York, 1918, 1994, English

Fiction

4.2 x 6.9 inches, paperback, 288 pages

ISBN: 9780553214185

Suggested Retail Price: $4.95

From the Publisher. Of Antonia, the passionate and majestic central character in Willa Cather’s greatest novel, the narrator, Jim Burden, says that she left “images in the mind that did not fade–that grew stronger with time.” The same is true of the book in which Cather enshrines her heroine. On one level, My Antonia is a straightforward narrative, written in limpid prose of uncanny descriptive accuracy, about the struggles endured by a family of immigrant pioneers and the small community that surrounds them on the unsettled Nebraska plains. On another, it is a novel that represents a perfect marriage of form and feeling.

In its magnificent tableaux of human beings caught in the toils of an abundant and overpowering natural world, and in the quiet, understated sympathy it displays for life of every sort, My Antonia is a novel that effortlessly encompasses history and wilderness and the destiny of the individual—even as it lovingly and unsentimentally portrays a woman whose robust spirit and enduring warmth make her emblematic of what Cather most admired in the American people.

On 4 book lists

Carin Goldberg

On Carin Goldberg’s Book List

Nancye Green

On Nancye Green’s Book List

Alexa Hampton

On Alexa Hampton’s Book List

I read this as a 13-year-old and petitioned my school to exchange this for George Eliot’s Middlemarch as our summer required reading. It is a beautiful, easy read. I love Cather.

Margaret McCurry

On Margaret McCurry’s Book List

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