Willa Cather My Antonia E-Book

Willa Cather

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 445

Beschreibung

Willa Cather My Ántonia : Unabridged Text with Introduction, Biography and Analysis My Ántonia is a novel published in 1918 by American writer Willa Cather, considered one of her best works. It is the final book of her "prairie trilogy" of novels, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. The novel tells the stories of an orphaned boy from Virginia, Jim Burden, and the elder daughter in a family of Bohemian immigrants, Ántonia Shimerda, who are each brought as children to be pioneers in Nebraska towards the end of the 19th century. Both the pioneers who first break the prairie sod for farming, as well as of the harsh but fertile land itself, feature in this American novel. The first year in the very new place leaves strong impressions in both children, affecting them lifelong. This novel is considered Cather's first masterpiece. Cather was praised for bringing the American West to life and making it personally interesting. This edition includes the full original version of the Willa Cather's book and provides other valuable features under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, including a commented introduction, helpful bibliography, author's biography, notes, references, and much more.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION : WILLA CATHER : A WOMAN AHEAD OF HER TIME

Biography

E

ARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

C

AREER

P

ERSONAL LIFE

W

RITING INFLUENCES

L

ITERARY STYLE AND THEMES

L

ATER YEARS

L

EGACY AND HONOR

B

IBLIOGRAPHY

Nonfiction

Novel

Collections

R

EFERENCES

MY ÁNTONIA - ORIGINAL 1918 EDITION

Book One

Book Two

Book Three

Book Four

Book Five

STUDY GUIDE

I

NTRODUCTION

C

HARACTERS

N

ARRATION

P

LOT SUMMARY

R

ECEPTION AND LITERARY SIGNIFICANCE

P

UBLICATION HISTORY

A

LLUSIONS TO THE NOVEL

A

DAPTATIONS

R

EFERENCE

SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Articles

Introduction : Willa Cather : A woman ahead of her time

Biography

Willa Sibert Cather ( December 7, 1873[2] – April 24, 1947[3]) was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I.

Cather grew up in Virginia and Nebraska, and graduated from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years,[4] supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33 she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence in Grand Manan, New Brunswick.

Early life and education

Cather was born Wilella Sibert Cather in 1873 on her maternal grandmother's farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia. Her father was Charles Fectigue Cather (d. 1928), whose family had lived on land in the valley for six generations. Cather's family originated in Wales, the family name deriving from Cadair Idris, a mountain in Gwynedd.[2] Her mother was Mary Virginia Boak (died 1931), a former school teacher. Within a year of Cather's birth, the family moved to Willow Shade, a Greek Revival-style home on 130 acres given to them by her paternal grandparents.

At the urging of Charles Cathers' parents, the family moved to Nebraska in 1883 when Willa was nine years old. The rich, flat farmland appealed to Charles' father, and the family wished to escape the tuberculosis outbreaks that were rampant in Virginia.[5] Willa's father tried his hand at farming for eighteen months; then he moved the family into the town of Red Cloud, where he opened a real estate and insurance business, and the children attended school for the first time.[2] Some of the earliest work produced by Cather was first published in the Red Cloud Chief, the city's local paper.[6] Cather's time in the western state, still on the frontier, was a deeply formative experience for her. She was intensely moved by the dramatic environment and weather, the vastness of the Nebraska prairie, and the various cultures of the European-American, immigrant and Native American families in the area.[3] Like Jim Burden in My Antonia the young Willa Cather saw the Nebraska frontier as a "place where there was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the materials out of which countries were made...Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out".[7]

Mary Cather had six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass, Jessica, James, John, and Elsie.[8]:5–7 Cather was closer to her brothers than to her sisters whom, according to biographer Hermione Lee, she "seems not to have liked very much."[9] Cather read widely, having made friends with a Jewish couple, the Weiners, who offered her free access to their extensive library.[10] She made house calls with the local physician, Dr. Robert Damerell, and decided to become a doctor.[11]

After Cather's essay on Thomas Carlyle was published in the Nebraska State Journal during her freshman year at the University of Nebraska,[2] she became a regular contributor to the Journal. In addition to her work with the local paper, Cather also served as the managing editor of The Hesperian, the University of Nebraska's student newspaper, and associated at the Lincoln Courier.[12] She changed her plans to major in science and become a physician, instead graduating with a B.A. in English in 1894.

Career

In 1896, Cather moved to Pittsburgh after being hired to write for the Home Monthly,[13] a women's magazine patterned after the successful Ladies' Home Journal.[2] A year later, she became a telegraph editor and drama critic for the Pittsburgh Leader and frequently contributed poetry and short fiction to The Library, another local publication.[14] In Pittsburgh, she taught Latin, algebra, and English composition[2] at Central High School for one year; she then taught English and Latin at Allegheny High School, where she became the head of the English department.

During her first year in Pittsburgh, Cather also wrote a number of short stories, including "Tommy, the Unsentimental," about a Nebraskan girl with a boy's name, who looks like a boy and saves her father's bank business. Janis P. Stout calls this story one of several Cather works that "demonstrate the speciousness of rigid gender roles and give favorable treatment to characters who undermine conventions."[15]

Cather's first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden, was published in 1905 by McClure, Phillips, and Company. It contains several of Cather's best-known stories—"A Wagner Matinee," "The Sculptor's Funeral," and "Paul's Case."

In 1906 Cather moved to New York City after being offered a position on the editorial staff of McClure's Magazine, a periodical connected with the publisher of The Troll Garden the year before. During her first year at McClure's she wrote a critical biography of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, although Georgine Milmine, a freelance researcher, was named as the sole author. Milmine had performed copious amounts of research, but she did not have the resources to produce a manuscript on her own.[2]"Mary Baker G. Eddy: The Story of Her Life and the History of Christian Science" was published in McClure's in fourteen installments over the next eighteen months, and then in book form as The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1909).

McClure's serialized Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912). Most reviews were favorable. The New York Times praised "the dramatic situations and the clever conversations,"[2] and The Atlantic called the writing "deft and skillful."[17]

Cather followed Alexander's Bridge with her Prairie Trilogy: O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). These works became both popular and critical successes. Cather was celebrated by national critics such as H. L. Mencken for writing in plainspoken language about ordinary people. Sinclair Lewis praised her work for making "the outside world know Nebraska as no one else has done."[18]

Through the 1910s and 1920s, Cather was firmly established as a major American writer, receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1922 for her novel One of Ours. By the 1930s, however, critics began to dismiss her as a "romantic, nostalgic writer who could not cope with the present."[19] Critics such as Granville Hicks charged Cather with failing to confront "contemporary life as it is"[20] and escaping into an idealized past. During the hardships of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, her work was seen as lacking social relevance.[20]

Cather's conservative politics and the same subject matter that appealed to Mencken, Randolph Bourne, and Carl Van Doren soured her reputation with younger, often left-leaning critics such as Hicks and Edmund Wilson.[21] Discouraged by the negative criticism of her work, Cather became defensive. She destroyed some of her correspondence and included a provision in her will that forbade the publication of her letters.[22]

Despite this critical opposition to her work, Cather remained a popular writer whose novels and short story collections continued to sell well. In 1931 Shadows on the Rock was the most widely read novel in the US, and Lucy Gayheart became a bestseller in 1935.[23]

Personal life

As a student at the University of Nebraska in the early 1890s, Cather sometimes used the masculine nickname "William" and wore masculine clothing.[24] A photograph in the University of Nebraska archives depicts Cather dressed like a young man and with "her hair shingled, at a time when females wore their hair fashionably long."[8]

Isabelle McClung, an unidentified man, and Willa Cather aboard the SS Westernland, 1902. Throughout Cather's adult life, her most significant friendships were with women. These included her college friend Louise Pound; the Pittsburgh socialite Isabelle McClung, with whom Cather traveled to Europe and at whose Toronto home she stayed for prolonged visits;[25] the opera singer Olive Fremstad; the pianist Yaltah Menuhin;[26] and most notably, the editor Edith Lewis, with whom Cather lived the last 39 years of her life. Cather's sexual identity remains a point of contention among scholars. While many argue for Cather as a lesbian and interpret her work through a lens of queer theory,[27] a highly vocal contingent of Cather scholars adamantly oppose such considerations. For example, scholar Janet Sharistanian has written, "Cather did not label herself a lesbian nor would she wish us to do so, and we do not know whether her relationships with women were sexual. In any case, it is anachronistic to assume that if Cather's historical context had been different, she would have chosen to write overtly about homoerotic love."[28]

Cather's relationship with Edith Lewis began in the early 1900s. The two women lived together in a series of apartments in New York City from 1908 until the writer's death in 1947. From 1913 to 1927, Cather and Lewis lived at No. 5 Bank Street in Greenwich Village. They moved when the apartment was scheduled for demolition during the construction of the Broadway – Seventh Avenue New York City Subway line (now the 1 2 3 trains).[29] Cather selected Lewis as the literary trustee for her estate.[30] Although she was born into a Baptist family, Cather began attending Episcopal services in 1906, and she joined the Episcopal Church in 1922.[31]

Beginning in 1922, Cather spent summers on Grand Manan Island, in New Brunswick, where she bought a cottage in Whale Cove, on the Bay of Fundy and where her penultimate short story, "Before Breakfast," is set.[32] It was the only house she ever owned.[2]:23 She valued the seclusion of the island, and did not mind that her cottage had neither indoor plumbing nor electricity. Anyone wishing to reach her could do so by telegraph or mail.[2] She stopped going to Grand Manan Island when Canada entered World War II (1939), since travel was more difficult, tourist amenities were scarcer, and a favourite island doctor had died. Cather was experiencing a long recuperation from gall bladder surgery.[2]

A resolutely private person, Cather had destroyed many old drafts, personal papers, and letters. Her will restricted the ability of scholars to quote from the personal papers that remain. However, in April 2013, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather—a collection of 566 letters Cather wrote to friends, family, and literary acquaintances such as Thornton Wilder and F. Scott Fitzgerald—was published, two years following the death of Cather's nephew and second literary executor, Charles Cather. Willa Cather's correspondence revealed complexity of her character and inner world.[33] The letters do not disclose any intimate details about Cather's personal life, but they do "make clear that [her] primary emotional attachments were to women."[34]

Writing influences

Cather admired Henry James as a "mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives."[35] She generally preferred past literary masters to contemporary writers. Some particular favorites were :

Dickens, Thackeray, Emerson, Hawthorne, Balzac, Flaubert, and Tolstoy.

While Cather enjoyed the novels of George Eliot, the Brontës, and Jane Austen, she regarded most women writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental and mawkish.[2] Cather's biographer James Woodress notes that Cather "so completely... embraced masculine values that when she wrote about women writers, she sounded like a patronizing man."[2] One contemporary exception was Sarah Orne Jewett, who became Cather's friend and mentor. Jewett advised Cather to use female narrators in her fiction, but Cather preferred to write from a male point of view.[2]:214 Jewett also encouraged Cather to write about subjects that had "teased the mind" for years.[36] Chief among these subjects were the people and experiences Cather remembered from her years in Nebraska. She dedicated O Pioneers!, the first novel in her Prairie Trilogy, to Jewett. Cather also admired the work of Katherine Mansfield, praising Mansfield's ability "to throw a luminous streak out onto the shadowy realm of personal relationships."[37]

Cather's high regard for the immigrant families forging lives and enduring hardships on the Nebraska plains shaped a good deal of her fiction. As a child, she visited immigrant families in her area and raced home in "the most unreasonable state of excitement," feeling that she "had got inside another person's skin."[38] Following a trip to Red Cloud in 1916 to visit her family, Cather decided to write a novel based on the events in the life of her childhood friend Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a Bohemian girl who became the model for the title character in My Ántonia.[2] Cather was likewise fascinated by the French-Canadian pioneers from Quebec who had settled in the Red Cloud area while she was a girl.[39]

During a brief stopover in Quebec with Edith Lewis in 1927, Cather was inspired to write a novel set in that French-Canadian city. Lewis recalled: "From the first moment that she looked down from the windows of the [Chateau] Frontenac [Hotel] on the pointed roofs and Norman outlines of the town of Quebec, Willa Cather was not merely stirred and charmed—she was overwhelmed by the flood of memories, recognition, surmise it called up; by the sense of its extraordinary French character, isolated and kept intact through hundreds of years, as if by a miracle, on this great un-French continent."[2] Cather finished her novel Shadows on the Rock, an historical novel set in 17th-century Quebec, in 1931; it was later included in Life Magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944.[40] The French influence is found in many other Cather works, including Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and her final, unfinished novel set in Avignon.

Literary style and themes

Although Cather began her writing career as a journalist, she made a distinction between journalism, which she saw as being primarily informative, and literature, which she saw as an art form.[41] Cather's work is often marked by its nostalgic tone, her subject matter and themes drawn from memories of her early years on the American plains. Some critics have charged Cather with being out of touch with her times and failing to use more experimental techniques, such as stream of consciousness, in her writing.[42] However, others have pointed out that Cather could follow no other literary path but her own:

She had formed and matured her ideas on art before she wrote a novel. She had no more reason to follow Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, whose work she respected, than they did to follow her. Her style solves the problems in which she was interested. She wanted to stand midway between the journalists whose omniscient objectivity accumulate more fact than any character could notice and the psychological novelist whose use of subjective point of view stories distorts objective reality. She developed her theory on a middle ground, selecting facts from experience on the basis of feeling and then presenting the experience in a lucid, objective style. Cather's style is not the accumulative cataloguing of the journalists, nor the fragmentary atomism of psychological associations.[43]

In a 1920 essay on Willa Cather, H.L. Mencken apologized for having suggested that Cather was a talented but inconsequential imitator of Edith Wharton. He praised her for abandoning New England as a locale for the "Middle West of the great immigrations." Mencken describes My Antonia as a sudden leap forward by Cather. "Here was a novel planned with the utmost skill, and executed in truly admirable fashion." he wrote. "Here, unless I err gravely, was the best piece of fiction ever done by a woman in America."[44][45]

The English novelist A. S. Byatt observes that with each work Cather reinvented the novel form "to look at a new human world."[46] Byatt identifies some of Cather's major themes as "the rising and setting of the sun, the brevity of life, the relation between dailiness and the rupture of dailiness, the moment when 'desire shall fail'."[46] Particularly in her frontier novels, Cather wrote of "life's terrors ... and its beauties".[47] Like the exiled characters of Henry James, an author who had a great influence on Cather, most of Cather's major characters live as exiled immigrants, "people trying to make their way in circumstances strange to them".[48] Joseph Urgo in Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration says Cather felt a connection between the immigrants' "sense of homelessness and exile" and her own feelings of exile when she lived on the frontier.[49] Susan Rosowski wrote that Cather was "the first to give immigrants heroic stature in serious American literature."[50]

Later years

Cather made her last trip to Red Cloud in 1931 for a family gathering following the death of her mother. She continued to stay in touch with her Red Cloud friends and she sent money to Annie Pavelka and other country families during the Depression years.[9]

In 1932, Cather published Obscure Destinies, her final collection of short fiction, which contained one of her most highly regarded stories, "Neighbour Rosicky." Cather and Edith Lewis moved into a new apartment on Park Avenue, and Cather began work on her next novel, Lucy Gayheart, a book that revealed "its author's darkening vision as she began her seventh decade."[2]

Cather suffered two devastating losses in 1938. In June, her favorite brother, Douglass, died of a heart attack. Cather was too grief-stricken to attend the funeral. Several months later, Isabelle McClung died. Cather and McClung had lived together when Cather first arrived in Pittsburgh, and while McClung eventually married and moved with her husband to Toronto,[51] the two women remained devoted friends. Cather wrote friends that Isabelle was the one for whom all her books had been written.[2]

Cather grew increasingly discouraged as the United States moved closer to involvement in World War II. When the French army surrendered to Nazi Germany, Cather wrote in her diary: "There seems to be no future at all for people of my generation."[8] During the summer of 1940, Cather and Lewis went to Grand Manan for the last time, and Cather finished what was to be her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a novel much darker in tone and subject matter than her previous works.[2] Sapphira lacks a moral sense and is not a character who evokes empathy. However, the novel was a great critical and commercial success, with an advance printing of 25,000 copies. It was then adopted by the Book of the Month Club, which bought more than 200,000 copies.[2]

Although an inflamed tendon in her hand hampered her writing, Cather managed to finish a good part of a novel set in Avignon, France. However, Edith Lewis destroyed the manuscript, according to Cather's instructions, when Cather died. Cather's remaining papers reveal that Cather had titled the unfinished manuscript Hard Punishments and set it in the 14th century during the papal reign of Antipope Benedict XIV.[9] She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943.[52] In 1944, Cather received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, an award given once a decade for an author's total accomplishments.[2] Though Cather suffered from no specific medical problems in her last years, those closest to her felt that her health was deteriorating.[2]

On April 24, 1947, Cather died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 73 in her home at 570 Park Avenue in Manhattan.[2][53]

Cather was buried in the Old Burying Ground, behind the Jaffrey Center Meeting House in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.[54] Her grave site, which she shares with Edith Lewis, is at the southwest corner of the graveyard. She had first visited Jaffrey in 1917 with Isabelle McClung, staying at the Shattuck Inn, where she came late in life for the seclusion necessary for her writing.[55] The inscription on her tombstone reads:

Legacy and honor

An American Arts Commemorative Series medallion depicting Cather

1955, The Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation (now the Willa Cather Foundation) was founded to support the study of her life and work, and to maintain many sites in her hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska.

1962, Cather was elected to the Nebraska Hall of Fame.

[

56

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1973, the U.S. Postal Service honored Willa Cather by issuing a stamp bearing her image.

1981, the U.S. Mint created the Willa Cather half-ounce gold medallion.

[

57

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1986, Cather was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame.

2000, Cather was named a member of the inaugural class of Virginia Women in History.

[

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2006, Willa Cather Foundation received a National Endowment of the Humanities grant "to develop its work, which includes maintaining a slice of Nebraskan prairie as “Catherland,” curating the Cather childhood home, holding Cather conferences, and publishing a Cather newsletter."

[

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2011, Cather was inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame.

Bibliography

Nonfiction

Willa Cather and Georgine Milmine,

The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science

(1909, reprinted U of Nebraska Press, 1993)

Not Under Forty

(1936, essays)

On Writing

(1949, reprint U Nebraska Press, 1988.

Novel

Alexander's Bridge

(1912)

O Pioneers!

(1913)

The Song of the Lark

(1915)

My Ántonia

(1918)

One of Ours

(1922)

A Lost Lady

(1923)

The Professor's House

(1925)

My Mortal Enemy

(1926)

Death Comes for the Archbishop

(1927)

Shadows on the Rock

(1931)

Lucy Gayheart

(1935)

Sapphira and the Slave Girl

(1940)

Essays and Article

On the Art of Fiction

(1920), The Borzoi

Collections

April Twilights

(1903, poetry)

The Troll Garden

(1905, short stories)

Youth and the Bright Medusa

(1920, short stories)

Obscure Destinies

(1932, three stories)

Not Under Forty

(1936, essays)

The Old Beauty and Others

(1948, three stories)

Willa Cather: On Writing

(1949, essays)

Five Stories

(1956, published by the Estate of Willa Cather)

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather

(published 2013)

This does not include recent collections of early stories which were originally published in periodicals.[60][61]

References

1. "Willa Cather" in The American Heritage Dictionary.

2. Woodress, James (1987). Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. p. 516. Cather's birth date is confirmed by a birth certificate and a January 22, 1874, letter of her father's referring to her. While working at McClure's Magazine, Cather claimed to be born in 1875. After 1920, she claimed 1876 as her birth year. That is the date carved into her gravestone at Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

3. "Willa Cather's Biography." Willa Cather Foundation website. Retrieved March 11, 2015.

4. Milfred R. Bennet. Willa Cather in Pittsburgh.Prairie Schooner, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 1959), pp. 64–76. Retrieved December 07, 2013.

5. Lee, Hermoine. Willa Cather: Double Lives.NY:Pantheon, 1989, p. 30

6. Walter, Katherine. "About The Red Cloud Chief". Nebraska Newspapers. University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

7. Cather, Willa. My Antonia. NY:Mariner Books, 1995, p. 8

8. Lewis, Edith (2000). Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

9. Lee, Hermione (1990). Willa Cather: Double Lives. New York: Pantheon Books.

10. Acocella, Joan. Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, p. 7

11. Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987, p. 52

12. Walter, Katherine. "Early Nebraska Journalist". University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Retrieved October 27, 2016.

13. Lowry, Patricia (December 8, 2008). "Places: In search of Willa Cather's East End haunts". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Retrieved July 20, 2010.

14. And Death Comes for Willa Cather, Famous Author, Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, 25 April 1947

15. Stout, Janis P. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000, p. 90.

16. Crane, My Antonia p. 57.

17. The Atlantic. November 1912, p. 683.

18. Omaha World-Herald, April 9, 1921.

19. O'Brien, Sharon. "Being Noncanonical: The Case Against Willa Cather." Cathy N. Davidson (ed.), Reading in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

20. O'Brien, p. 246.

21. Decker, James M. (April 2003). "Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism". Modern Language Review.

22. Joan Acocella. What’s in Cather’s Letters. The New Yorker, April 9, 2013.

23. Acocella, Joan. Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. Lincoln, NE.:University of Nebraska Press, 2000, p. 25.

24. O'Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford, 1987. pp. 96–113.

25. Gatenby, Greg (1993). The Wild is Always There: Canada through the eyes of foreign writers. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada. p. 214. ISBN0-394-28023-7.

26. Rolfe, Lionel. (2004). The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin & Willa Cather. American Legends/ California Classics Books, 168 pp. ISBN 1-879395-46-0.

27. Lindemann, Marilee. Willa Cather: Queering America. NY:Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 25.

28. Sharistanian, Janet. Introduction to My Ántonia, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. xiii.

29. Bunyan, Patrick. All Around the Town: Amazing Manhattan Facts and Curiosities, p. 66. New York: Fordham University Press, 1999

30. "Cather's Life: Chronology". The Willa Cather Archive, University of Nebraska. Retrieved March 21, 2007.

31. Acocella, Joan. Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, p.4.

32. Ahern, Amy. "Willa Cather: Longer Biographical Sketch". The Willa Cather Archive, University of Nebraska. Retrieved March 21, 2007.

33. Christopher Benfey. Willa Cather's Correspondence Reveals Something New: The rage of a great American novelist, The New Republic, October 12, 2013.

34. Schuessler, Jennifer. "O Revelations! Letters, Once Banned, Flesh Out Willa Cather." The New York Times. March 22, 2013, A1.

35. Curtin, William M., ed. The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893–1902. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1970, p. 248.

36. Cather, Willa. Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1988, p. 48

37. Cather, Willa. Not Under Forty. New York: Knopf, 1936, p. 135.

38. Bennet, Mildred. The World of Willa Cather. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961, pp. 169–70.

39. Danker, Kathleen (Winter 2000). "The Influence of Willa Cather's French-Canadian Neighbors in Nebraska in Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock." Great Plains Quarterly. p. 34.

40. Canby, Henry Seidel. "The 100 Outstanding Books of 1924–1944." Life Magazine, August 14, 1944. Chosen in collaboration with the magazine's editors.

41. Middleton, Joanne (1990). Willa Cather's Modernism: A Study of Style and Technique. Hackensack, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson. p. 27.

42. Middleton p. 36.

43. Curtin, William M. "Willa Cather: Individualism and Style." Colby Library Quarterly. June 1968, No. 2, p. 52.

44. Mencken, H.L.. (1920). "Willa Cather". The Borzoi 1920. Retrieved April 5, 2016.

45. The Borzoi 1920: Being a Sort of Record of Five Years' Publishing. NY: Alfred Knopf, 1920, pp. 28–32

46. Byatt, A. S. (December 8, 2006). "American pastoral". Retrieved January 23, 2014.

47. Acocella, Joan, p. 6

48. Acocella,Joan. Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, p. 5

49. Urgo, Joseph R. Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995, p. 17

50. Rosowski, Susan. The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (1986), p. 45

51. Gatenby, Greg (1993). The Wild is Always There: Canada through the eyes of foreign writers. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada. p. 215. ISBN 0-394-28023-7.

52. "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter C" American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved July 29, 2014.

53. "Author of Lost Lady Won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922 for Writing One of Ours". The New York Times. April 25, 1947. Retrieved January 18, 2014. Willa Sibert Cather, noted American novelist, died at 4:30 P.M. yesterday in her home at 570 Park Avenue. After Miss Cather's death a secretary, who was with her at the time, was too upset to talk about it. It was reported that death was due to a cerebral hemorrhage. The author was 70 years old in December.

54. Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Location 7776). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.

55. "Jaffrey: Willa Cather's Last Page". Retrieved April 9, 2014.

56. "Nebraska Hall of Fame Members". nebraskahistory.org.

57. "U.S. Issues Two More Gold Medallions in Artists Series". The Philadelphia Inquirer. Philadelphia, PA: Knight Ridder. November 4, 1984. p. R13.

58. "Virginia Women in History".Lva.virginia.gov. Retrieved 2016-12-13.

59. Lee, Hermoine (July 11, 2013). "Willa Cather: A Hidden Voice". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved January 24, 2014.

60. "Cather's Life: Chronology". The Willa Cather Archive. Archived from the original on July 1, 2007. Retrieved August 13, 2007.

61. "Cather's Writings: Short Fiction". The Willa Cather Archive. Archived from the original on July 2, 2007. Retrieved August 13, 2007.

62. Geyer, Joel; Giannone, Richard (September 8, 2005). "Willa Cather: The Road is All". The Washington Post. Retrieved April 17, 2013.

My Ántonia

original 1918 version

Book One

THE SHIMERDAS

I FIRST heard of Ántonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. I traveled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the “hands” on my father’s old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to work for my grandfather. Jake’s experience of the world was not much wider than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we set out together to try our fortunes in a new world.

We went all the way in day-coaches, becoming more sticky and grimy with each stage of the journey. Jake bought everything the newsboys offered him: candy, oranges, brass collar buttons, a watch-charm, and for me a “Life of Jesse James,” which I remember as one of the most satisfactory books I have ever read. Beyond Chicago we were under the protection of a friendly passenger conductor, who knew all about the country to which we were going and gave us a great deal of advice in exchange for our confidence. He seemed to us an experienced and worldly man who had been almost everywhere; in his conversation he threw out lightly the names of distant States and cities. He wore the rings and pins and badges of different fraternal orders to which he belonged. Even his cuff-buttons were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was more inscribed than an Egyptian obelisk. Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant car ahead there was a family from “across the water” whose destination was the same as ours.

“They can’t any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she can say is ‘We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.’ She’s not much older than you, twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she’s as bright as a new dollar. Don’t you want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She’s got the pretty brown eyes, too!”

This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to “Jesse James.” Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to get diseases from foreigners.

I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything about the long day’s journey through Nebraska. Probably by that time I had crossed so many rivers that I was dull to them. The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.

I had been sleeping, curled up in a red plush seat, for a long while when we reached Black Hawk. Jake roused me and took me by the hand. We stumbled down from the train to a wooden siding, where men were running about with lanterns. I could n’t see any town, or even distant lights; we were surrounded by utter darkness. The engine was panting heavily after its long run. In the red glow from the fire-box, a group of people stood huddled together on the platform, encumbered by bundles and boxes. I knew this must be the immigrant family the conductor had told us about. The woman wore a fringed shawl tied over her head, and she carried a little tin trunk in her arms, hugging it as if it were a baby. There was an old man, tall and stooped. Two half-grown boys and a girl stood holding oil-cloth bundles, and a little girl clung to her mother’s skirts. Presently a man with a lantern approached them and began to talk, shouting and exclaiming. I pricked up my ears, for it was positively the first time I had ever heard a foreign tongue.

Another lantern came along. A bantering voice called out: “Hello, are you Mr. Burden’s folks? If you are, it’s me you’re looking for. I’m Otto Fuchs. I’m Mr. Burden’s hired man, and I’m to drive you out. Hello, Jimmy, ain’t you scared to come so far west?”

I looked up with interest at the new face in the lantern light. He might have stepped out of the pages of “Jesse James.” He wore a sombrero hat, with a wide leather band and a bright buckle, and the ends of his mustache were twisted up stiffly, like little horns. He looked lively and ferocious, I thought, and as if he had a history. A long scar ran across one cheek and drew the corner of his mouth up in a sinister curl. The top of his left ear was gone, and his skin was brown as an Indian’s. Surely this was the face of a desperado. As he walked about the platform in his high-heeled boots, looking for our trunks, I saw that he was a rather slight man, quick and wiry, and light on his feet. He told us we had a long night drive ahead of us, and had better be on the hike. He led us to a hitching-bar where two farm wagons were tied, and I saw the foreign family crowding into one of them. The other was for us. Jake got on the front seat with Otto Fuchs, and I rode on the straw in the bottom of the wagon-box, covered up with a buffalo hide. The immigrants rumbled off into the empty darkness, and we followed them.

I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over. When the straw settled down I had a hard bed. Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land — slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the sheep-fold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

II

I DO not remember our arrival at my grandfather’s farm sometime before daybreak, after a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy work-horses. When I awoke, it was afternoon. I was lying in a little room, scarcely larger than the bed that held me, and the window-shade at my head was flapping softly in a warm wind. A tall woman, with wrinkled brown skin and black hair, stood looking down at me; I knew that she must be my grandmother. She had been crying, I could see, but when I opened my eyes she smiled, peered at me anxiously, and sat down on the foot of my bed.

“Had a good sleep, Jimmy?” she asked briskly. Then in a very different tone she said, as if to herself, “My, how you do look like your father!” I remembered that my father had been her little boy; she must often have come to wake him like this when he overslept. “Here are your clean clothes,” she went on, stroking my coverlid with her brown hand as she talked. “But first you come down to the kitchen with me, and have a nice warm bath behind the stove. Bring your things; there’s nobody about.”

“Down to the kitchen” struck me as curious; it was always “out in the kitchen” at home. I picked up my shoes and stockings and followed her through the living-room and down a flight of stairs into a basement. This basement was divided into a dining-room at the right of the stairs and a kitchen at the left. Both rooms were plastered and whitewashed — the plaster laid directly upon the earth walls, as it used to be in dugouts. The floor was of hard cement. Up under the wooden ceiling there were little half-windows with white curtains, and pots of geraniums and wandering Jew in the deep sills. As I entered the kitchen I sniffed a pleasant smell of gingerbread baking. The stove was very large, with bright nickel trimmings, and behind it there was a long wooden bench against the wall, and a tin washtub, into which grandmother poured hot and cold water. When she brought the soap and towels, I told her that I was used to taking my bath without help.

“Can you do your ears, Jimmy? Are you sure? Well, now, I call you a right smart little boy.”

It was pleasant there in the kitchen. The sun shone into my bath-water through the west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came up and rubbed himself against the tub, watching me curiously. While I scrubbed, my grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until I called anxiously, “Grandmother, I’m afraid the cakes are burning!” Then she came laughing, waving her apron before her as if she were shooing chickens.

She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were looking at something, or listening to something, far away. As I grew older, I came to believe that it was only because she was so often thinking of things that were far away. She was quick-footed and energetic in all her movements. Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that everything should go with due order and decorum. Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps a little strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it. She was then fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance.

After I was dressed I explored the long cellar next the kitchen. It was dug out under the wing of the house, was plastered and cemented, with a stairway and an outside door by which the men came and went. Under one of the windows there was a place for them to wash when they came in from work.

While my grandmother was busy about supper I settled myself on the wooden bench behind the stove and got acquainted with the cat — he caught not only rats and mice, but gophers, I was told. The patch of yellow sunlight on the floor traveled back toward the stairway, and grandmother and I talked about my journey, and about the arrival of the new Bohemian family; she said they were to be our nearest neighbors. We did not talk about the farm in Virginia, which had been her home for so many years. But after the men came in from the fields, and we were all seated at the supper-table, then she asked Jake about the old place and about our friends and neighbors there.

My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and spoke kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him. The thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly, snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more impressive.

Grandfather’s eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and regular — so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life. He had a delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a young man his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.

As we sat at the table Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances at each other. Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper that he was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had led an adventurous life in the Far West among mining-camps and cow outfits. His iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain pneumonia, and he had drifted back to live in a milder country for a while. He had relatives in Bismarck, a German settlement to the north of us, but for a year now he had been working for grandfather.

The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper to me about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a sale; he had been riding him to find out whether he had any bad tricks, but he was a “perfect gentleman,” and his name was Dude. Fuchs told me everything I wanted to know: how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming blizzard when he was a stage-driver, and how to throw a lasso. He promised to rope a steer for me before sundown next day. He got out his “chaps” and silver spurs to show them to Jake and me, and his best cowboy boots, with tops stitched in bold design — roses, and true-lover’s knots, and undraped female figures. These, he solemnly explained, were angels.

Before we went to bed Jake and Otto were called up to the living-room for prayers. Grandfather put on silver-rimmed spectacles and read several Psalms. His voice was so sympathetic and he read so interestingly that I wished he had chosen one of my favorite chapters in the Book of Kings. I was awed by his intonation of the word “Selah.” “HE SHALL CHOOSE OUR INHERITANCE FOR US, THE EXCELLENCY OF JACOB WHOM HE LOVED. SELAH.” I had no idea what the word meant; perhaps he had not. But, as he uttered it, it became oracular, the most sacred of words.

Early the next morning I ran out of doors to look about me. I had been told that ours was the only wooden house west of Black Hawk — until you came to the Norwegian settlement, where there were several. Our neighbors lived in sod houses and dugouts — comfortable, but not very roomy. Our white frame house, with a story and half-story above the basement, stood at the east end of what I might call the farmyard, with the windmill close by the kitchen door. From the windmill the ground sloped westward, down to the barns and granaries and pig-yards. This slope was trampled hard and bare, and washed out in winding gullies by the rain. Beyond the corncribs, at the bottom of the shallow draw, was a muddy little pond, with rusty willow bushes growing about it. The road from the post-office came directly by our door, crossed the farmyard, and curved round this little pond, beyond which it began to climb the gentle swell of unbroken prairie to the west. There, along the western sky-line, it skirted a great cornfield, much larger than any field I had ever seen. This cornfield, and the sorghum patch behind the barn, were the only broken land in sight. Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red grass, most of it as tall as I.

North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set strip of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning yellow. This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to look very hard to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant against the grass. It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them, and over the plum-patch behind the sod chicken-house.

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out, her sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I did not want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner. The garden, curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house, and the way to it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral. Grandmother called my attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with copper, which hung by a leather thong from her belt. This, she said, was her rattlesnake cane. I must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife; she had killed a good many rattlers on her way back and forth. A little girl who lived on the Black Hawk road was bitten on the ankle and had been sick all summer.

I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning. Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}

Alone, I should never have found the garden — except, perhaps, for the big yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their withering vines — and I felt very little interest in it when I got there. I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass. While grandmother took the pitchfork we found standing in one of the rows and dug potatoes, while I picked them up out of the soft brown earth and put them into the bag, I kept looking up at the hawks that were doing what I might so easily do.

When grandmother was ready to go, I said I would like to stay up there in the garden awhile.

She peered down at me from under her sunbonnet. “Are n’t you afraid of snakes?”

“A little,” I admitted, “but I’d like to stay anyhow.”

“Well, if you see one, don’t have anything to do with him. The big yellow and brown ones won’t hurt you; they’re bull-snakes and help to keep the gophers down. Don’t be scared if you see anything look out of that hole in the bank over there. That’s a badger hole. He’s about as big as a big ‘possum, and his face is striped, black and white. He takes a chicken once in a while, but I won’t let the men harm him. In a new country a body feels friendly to the animals. I like to have him come out and watch me when I’m at work.”

Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes over her shoulder and went down the path, leaning forward a little. The road followed the windings of the draw; when she came to the first bend she waved at me and disappeared. I was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content.

I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

III

ON Sunday morning Otto Fuchs was to drive us over to make the acquaintance of our new Bohemian neighbors. We were taking them some provisions, as they had come to live on a wild place where there was no garden or chicken-house, and very little broken land. Fuchs brought up a sack of potatoes and a piece of cured pork from the cellar, and grandmother packed some loaves of Saturday’s bread, a jar of butter, and several pumpkin pies in the straw of the wagon-box. We clambered up to the front seat and jolted off past the little pond and along the road that climbed to the big cornfield.