My Ántonia

Jim Burden, orphaned and sent west to his grandparents’ Nebraska farm, arrives on the same train as the Shimerdas, a Bohemian immigrant family, and forms a lifelong bond with their spirited daughter Antonia. Through Jim’s remembering eyes, Willa Cather traces their childhood on the raw prairie, the hardships that break some settlers and toughen others, and the diverging paths that carry Jim to the city while leaving Antonia to a life of farm labor and family. Published in 1918 and often called Cather’s finest achievement, the novel lifts the immigrant frontier into something close to myth, heavy with memory and loss. Its portrait of a strong, enduring woman anchors one of the classic works of American literature. Free to download as a PDF and EPUB.