My ntonia

After the death of his parents, Jim Burden is sent to live with his grandparents in Nebraska, where he meets his first and most prominent love, Antonia Shimera. As pioneers in Nebraska, the Shimera family expected hardships, but none as devastating as a death in the family. Narrated by Jim Burden, an orphan living with his grandparents next door to the Shimera's, My Antonia follows the coming of age and life of Jim and Antonia, the eldest daughter in the Shimera family. Starting when Jim and Antonia were young kids, the Burdens and the Shimera's live as neighbors in the plains of 19th century Nebraska. While the weather was often harsh and the untamed land made it difficult to yield crops, the Shimera family worked hard to maintain a content life. However, when a tragic death strikes the Shimera family, they fall into poverty despite the aid Jim's grandparents try to offer. As her family's farm fails, Antonia has to quit school to help out with manual labor. Antonia gets a job as a town girl, helping care for children and households in order to support her family. Meanwhile, Jim moves into town as well for higher education, and is able to reconnect with Antonia, though she does not have as much leisure time as he does. As they both grow into adulthood, Jim witnesses the Shimera's and Antonia to make difficult choices and somber sacrifices, contrasting their hardships to his own comfortable life.
My Antonia earned commercial and critical acclaim soon after its publication, and has inspired film and stage adaptations since. With themes of feminism, insight on lower class Americans, and the use of deep metaphors, Willa Cather's My Antonia is a classic gem worthy of even more recognition.
Now redesigned with an eye-catching cover and printed in an easy-to-read font, this edition of Willa Cather's My Antonia restores the classic novel to create an engaging experience for modern audiences.

Willa Sibert Cather is well-known for her Great Plains-set books, such as O Pioneers! The Song of the Lark, and My ntonia. Her novel One of Ours, which takes place during World War I, won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. When Willa Cather was nine years old, her family relocated from Virginia to Webster County, Nebraska. Afterwards, the family made Red Cloud, Minnesota, their home. Cather spent ten years in Pittsburgh after earning her degree from the University of Nebraska Lincoln, where she worked as a high school English teacher and magazine editor to support herself. She made her lifelong home in New York City when she moved there at the age of 33, though she also traveled extensively and made frequent trips to her summer house on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She lived her final 39 years with Edith Lewis, her domestic partner, before receiving a breast cancer diagnosis and passing away from a brain hemorrhage. Beside her, in a Jaffrey, New Hampshire, plot, lies Lewis. As a novelist of the frontier and pioneer experience, Cather attained prominence.