In the lives of mortals,

the best days are the first to flee…

My Antonia* set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, is Willa Cather’s rich and soulful tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on untamed prairie land.

She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign tongue, the restraints on women of the time, the desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great capacity for tolerance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.

Cather paints her descriptions of the vastness of nature, the high, red grasses, the endless wind on the plains, with strokes so vivid as to make us feel in our bones we've just come in from a walk on that very landscape ourselves.

WILLA CATHER (1873-1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her classic novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers! The Song of the Lark, and My Antonia. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.

*My Antonia, is nothing short of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue.

-Melanie Rehak