My antonia first edition5/10/2023 ![]() ![]() Through the eyes of Jim Burden, her tutor and disappointed admirer, we follow Antonia from farm to town and through hardships both natural and human, surviving everything from poverty to a failed romance-and not only surviving, but triumphing. We first meet Antonia Shimerda as the young daughter of a Bohemian immigrant who in time will be driven to suicide by the oceanic loneliness of life on the Nebraska prairie. In this symphonically powerful and magnificently observed novel, Willa Cather created one of the most winning heroines in American fiction, a woman whose robust high spirits and calm, undemonstrative strength make her emblematic of the virtues Cather most admired in her country. ![]() “No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Antonia.” Sales weren’t smashing (there was a war going on, after all), but steadily increased as the years went by.The first printing was 3,500 copies and they sold for $1.60 each.My Antonia was published on September 21, 1918.The tent is behind Cather in the picture above. ![]() Each day she’d walk down from the inn where she was staying into a meadow where her friends set up a tent for her use. ![]() Cather wrote part of this novel in a tent in Jaffrey, New Hamphire.Cather started writing the novel after having spent three months in Red Cloud, NE during which time her mother was ill and Cather took on the household work, including cooking for eight. ![]()
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