My Antonia

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Of Antonia, the passionate heroine of Willa Cather's greatest novel, the narrator says that she left 'images in the mind that did not fade - that grew stronger with time'. The same could be said of the novel itself. On one level it is a straighforward story, beautifully written, of the struggle for survival of a family of pioneers on the vast Nebraska plains. On another it encompasses history, the relationship ofhuman beings and the natural world, 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.

'The time will come when Willa Cather will be ranked above Hemingway.' - Leon Edel

'The time will come when Willa Cather will be ranked above Hemingway.'
Leon Edel

About Willa Cather

WILLA CATHER (1873-1947) was born in Virginia and was about nine years old when her family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska. After graduating from the University of Nebraska, she worked for the Nebraska State Journal, then moved to Pittsburgh and finally to New York City. There she joined McClure’s magazine. After meeting the author Sarah Orne Jewett, she decided to quit journalism and devote herself full time to fiction. Her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, appeared in 1912, but her place in American literature was established with her first Nebraska novel, O Pioneers! published in 1913, followed by her most famous pioneer novel, My Antonia, in 1918. In 1922 she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours. Her other novels include Shadows on the Rock, The Song of the Lark, The Professor’s House, My Mortal Enemy, and Lucy Gayheart. She died in 1947.

INTRODUCER BIOGRAPHY
NICHOLAS GASKILL is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at Oriel College. He is the author of Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color and editor of the The Lure of Whitehead.

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