The 1918 published novel “My Antonia” tells the stories of an orphaned boy from Virginia Jim

burden as he trundles across the endless prairie to start a new life with his grandparents. Willa
Cather was born and raised on the Great Plains and her novel stands as a celebration of the
landscape and its settlers. It shows how these people were at the mercy of nature; how their life
and livelihoods hung on the turn of the seasons. Its unobtrusive, effortlessly vivid prose leads us
from "the windy springs and the blazing summers" all the way to a winter that's so clear, crisp
and crystalline it feels as though we're witnessing it for the very first time.and the elder daughter
in a family of bohemian immigrants Antonia Shimirda