The novel is important both for its literary aesthetic and as a portrayal of important aspects of American social ideals and history, particularly the centrality of migration to American culture.įor more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. Set during the great migration west to settle the plains of the North American continent, the narrative follows Antonia Shimerda, a pioneer who comes to Nebraska as a child and grows with the country, inspiring a childhood friend, Jim Burden, to write her life story. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.Willa Cather's My Ántonia is considered one of the most significant American novels of the twentieth century.

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But this archetypal success story is darkened by loss, and Alexandra's devotion to the land may come at the cost of love itself.At once a sophisticated pastoral and a prototype for later feminist novels, O Pioneers! is a work in which triumph is inextricably enmeshed with tragedy, a story of people who do not claim a land so much as they submit to it and, in the process, become greater than they were.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. Cather's heroine is Alexandra Bergson, who arrives on the wind-blasted prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, as a girl and grows up to make it a prosperous farm.

No other work of fiction so faithfully conveys both the sharp physical realities and the mythic sweep of the transformation of the American frontier-and the transformation of the people who settled it. The first of Cather’s renowned prairie novels, O Pioneers! established a new voice in American literature-turning the stories of ordinary Midwesterners and immigrants into authentic literary characters.O Pioneers! was Willa Cather's first great novel, and to many it remains her unchallenged masterpiece.

Cather great plains trilogy