Description
Written in the style of a memoir, My Ántonia chronicles Jim Burden’s friendship with the daughter of a Czech immigrant family. Recently orphaned, he moves west to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. Riding the same train is the Shimerda family, who are also on their way to settle in the area. The Shimerdas have a difficult life as pioneers: living in a sod house, working the fields, and running out of food in the winter. Jim soon becomes smitten with Ántonia, the eldest daughter, as they grow up and explore the landscape around them together. Through his eyes, we see both how she shapes the land around her and is shaped by the rigors of poverty.
Similarly to Jim, Willa Cather spent her early years in Nebraska but most of her adult life in Eastern cities. She pays homage to her homeland with her Prairie Trilogy of novels: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. They are tinged with her characteristic straightforward language, reverence for nature, and nostalgia, even as she acknowledges the hardships of the past.
Published in 1918 to great enthusiasm, My Ántonia is considered one of Cather’s finest works and a defining point in her identity as a writer.
Description
Claude Wheeler is the son of a successful Nebraskan farmer and a very devout mother. He’s sent to a private religious college because his mother feels it’s safer, but he yearns for State college where he might be able expand his knowledge of the real world. Claude doesn’t feel comfortable in any situation, and almost every step he takes is a wrong one. While he’s struggling to find his way in a questionable marriage, the U.S. decides to enter World War I, and Claude enlists. He’s commissioned as a lieutenant, and he and his outfit are deployed to France in the waning months of the war. There Claude finds the purpose he’s been missing his whole life.
One of Ours is Cather’s first novel following the completion of her Prairie Trilogy, which she finished before the U.S. had entered the war. Cather’s cousin Grosvenor had grown up on the farm next to hers, had many of the traits she gave to Claude, and, like her protagonist, went with the Army to France towards the end of the war. After the war was over, she felt compelled to write something different than the novels she had become known for, saying that this one “stood between me and anything else.” Although today it’s not considered her best work, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1923.
Description
Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! was first published in June of 1913 by Houghton Mifflin to high praise. Cather was immensely proud of the work and considered it her first “true” novel, having discovered her own form and subject.
Told in five parts, O Pioneers! follows the Bergsons, a family of Swedish-American immigrants farming the prairie of Nebraska at the turn of the 20th century. After the death of her father, heroine Alexandra Bergson inherits the family farm, using her insight to transform it from a precarious enterprise to a prosperous one over the following decade. As the Nebraskan farming community grows and her older brothers build families and comfortable lives, Alexandra remains independent, attached only to the land, her youngest brother, Emil, and her neighbor, Marie Shabata. These three central characters navigate duty, familial pressures, tragedy, and uncertain romance.
With its independent, entrepreneurial female main character, O Pioneers! can be read as a deeply feminist novel that nevertheless upholds American ideals of national destiny through pastoral settlement.
Description
The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather’s third novel, was written in 1915. It is said to have been inspired by the real-life soprano Olive Fremstad, a celebrated Swedish-American singer who, like the protagonist, was active in New York and Europe during the time period depicted in the novel.
The work explores how an artist’s early life influences their work. In the novel, Thea Kronborg discovers her talent as a singer, and goes on to achieve great fame and success once she leaves her tiny village of Moonstone. Cather eschewed depicting rural life as being idyllic, instead focusing on the conservative, restricted, patriarchal structures that its inhabitants live by. Her work is thus considered to be one of the earliest so-called “Revolt Novels.” She depicts a time at the end of the 19th century when the American West was expanding rapidly and Americans were gaining sophistication in their understanding of culture and artists, particularly compared to Europe. The title of the novel comes from the name of a 1884 painting by Jules Breton, which is described and considered in the book itself.