My Antonia (1918) is the wistful tale of an immigrant girl from Bohemia, who has settled on the virgin prairies of Nebraska in order to farm.
Narrated by Antonia’s childhood friend Jim Burden, the novel draws heavily upon Willa Cather’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willa_Cather) own formative years, as well as, through the persona of Jim, Cather’s experience of New York, where she worked as editor of the McClure magazine.
The novel is the third in a sequence of Cather’s works which deal with immigrant settlers in the USA. Writing as a lesbian in an era in which homosexuality had yet to meet with public tolerance, Cather populated her fiction with strong female protagonists; Antonia is one such heroine, an embodiment of the pioneering spirit of a new nation. Her sorrows and joys, her loves and family tragedies are those of whole generations on the land. Cather’s ravishing prose pays due tribute to it all.
Filmed as a movie for television in 1995 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113892/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1)
Willa Cather
176 pages in Dover Publications Inc. paperback edition.
ISBN 978-0486282404