My Antonia American Classics Edition - (HarperCollins American Classics) by Willa Cather (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author's "masterpiece" (Library of America) and a National Endowment for the Arts "Big Read" pick.

"No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia."--H.L. Menken

In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States, HarperCollins is proud to present this library of American classics drawn from our storied catalog. Willa Cather's powerful, heartfelt novel is the unforgettable story of an immigrant woman's life on the hardscrabble Nebraska plains.

I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Ántonia had not lost the fire of life.

Through Jim Burden's affectionate reminiscence of his childhood friend, the free-spirited Ántonia Shimerda, a larger, uniquely American portrait emerges, both of a community struggling with unforgiving terrain and of a woman who, amid great hardship, stands as a timeless inspiration.

With a Foreword by Kathleen Norris, the award-winning poet, writer, and author of many New York Times bestselling books, including Dakota: A Spiritual Geography.

Review Quotes

"My Ántonia is about how travel transforms us, for better or worse. ...The vast American landscape seems to have imprinted itself on Cather's soul and prose: Her plainspoken sentences, free of modifying flourishes, take the shape of the land itself. You can almost hear the wind beneath the words." - Wall Street Journal, Mary Morris
"No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia." - H. L. Mencken
"For the beauty of the writing, I would say that my go-to is actually My Antonia by Willa Cather, which is a book I first read in high school and found slightly boring but beautiful, and then read again in my 20s and was just totally enraptured by and then have gone back to again and again and again as a beautiful piece of writing" - Rebecca Traister