Homing in on the Prairie with Willa Cather's My Ántonia

Great American Novel

Willa Cather's most famous novel was published only two months before the Armistice ended the bloodshed of the Great War, and in its powerfully imagistic portrait of Midwestern homesteading, it offered readers an emotional connection to the nation's founding myth of pioneer fortitude. Yet My Ántonia wasn't just a story about pilgrims' progress across the prairies: it was a story of immigrants struggling to realize the American Dream that appeared in an era of extreme xenophobia that will feel painfully resonant to contemporary readers. In telling the story of the resilient Ántonia Shimerda and other "hired girls" from Bohemia (the modern-day Czech Republic) and other Eastern European states, Cather paid tribute to real-life migrants she had grown up with in Red Cloud, Nebraska, a small but artistically vibrant train depot that today does a thriving business in Cather tourism. In addition to Cather's powerful style and her warm memories of farming struggles, we focus on the friendship between Ántonia and the orphaned narrator, Jim Burden. At the end of the day, My Ántonia is possibly the greatest story about a platonic friendship between a woman and a man in American literature.