My Ántonia [Norton Critical Edition]
by Willa Cather 
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"Set in the Nebraska landscape in a community evocative of Cather's own (Red Cloud), My Antonia tells the story of Antonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant, and Jim Burden, who like Cather was uprooted from Virginia to the Nebraska prairie. Antonia and Jim, like many of the other characters in this 1918 novel, are based on Cather's childhood friends. This Norton Critical Edition is based on the first published edition of the novel (1918). It is accompanied by explanatory footnotes, key show more illustrations, and introduction that gives readers an historical overview of both author and novel, and a note on the text. "Contexts and Backgrounds" is a rich collection of materials organized around the novel's central themes: "Autobiographical and Biographical Writings," "Letters," and "Americanization and Immigration." Willa Cather, Edith Lewis, Latrobe Carroll, Rose C. Feld, Guy Reynolds, Woodrow Wilson, Peter Roberts, Horace M. Kallen, Sarka B. Hrbkova, and Rose Rosicky, among others, are included. "Criticism" spans a century of scholarship on Willa Cather and My Antonia, from contemporary reviews by Henry Walcott Boynton, H. L. Mencken, and Elia W. Peattie to recent critical assessments by Terence Martin, Blanche Gelfant, Jean Schwind, Richard H. Millington, Susan Rosowski, Mike Fischer, Janis Stout, Marilee Lindemann, and Linda Joyce Brown. A chronology of Cather's life and work and a selected bibliography are also included" -- show lessTags
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Just marvelous. I read this to commemorate the 100th anniversary of its publication. Richly textured, capturing the intersecting and then diverging lives of two lifelong friends and companions on the Nebraska plains. Wonderful descriptions of the landscape and the hardship experienced by those immigrants of a century ago as they adapt to a new land and each other and is still relevant today. I discovered Willa Cather in adulthood and she has become one of my favorite authors.
Loved it! Great story and characters. I always find it sad because they're dead now. Had to hurry to finish because I was reading on scribe and my I pad broke so I had to finish it before I left Florida.
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151+ Works 45,895 Members
Willa Siebert Cather was born in 1873 in the home of her maternal grandmother in western Virginia. Although she had been named Willela, her family always called her "Willa." Upon graduating from the University of Nebraska in 1895, Cather moved to Pittsburgh where she worked as a journalist and teacher while beginning her writing career. In 1906, show more Cather moved to New York to become a leading magazine editor at McClure's Magazine before turning to writing full-time. She continued her education, receiving her doctorate of letters from the University of Nebraska in 1917, and honorary degrees from the University of Michigan, the University of California, Columbia, Yale, and Princeton. Cather wrote poetry, short stories, essays, and novels, winning awards including the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, One of Ours, about a Nebraska farm boy during World War I. She also wrote The Professor's House, My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Lucy Gayheart. Some of Cather's novels were made into movies, the most well-known being A Lost Lady, starring Barbara Stanwyck. In 1961, Willa Cather was the first woman ever voted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame. She was also inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners in Oklahoma in 1974, and the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca, New York in 1988. Cather died on April 24, 1947, of a cerebral hemorrhage, in her Madison Avenue, New York home, where she had lived for many years. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Reference guide/companion to
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- Canonical title
- My Ántonia [Norton Critical Edition]
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