My An'toni'a. Willa Cather.

My An'toni'a
Willa Cather
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1918.

Why read it? A novel that helps the reader understand the experience of opening the American prairie to society. The joys and soorrows and burdens of being pioneers in America's westward movement. The history books can tell about the westward movement, but this novel--and others, notably Giants in the Earth--can convey the experience and the human cost of being a pioneer.

A novel about the Shimerda fmaily, immigrants from Bohemia. The novel is narrated by Jim Burden, a friend of An'toni'a's when the two are growing up.

Jim Burden and An'toni'a Shimerda arrive as children in pioneer Black Hawk, Nebraska, he from Virginia and she with her family from Bohemia. An'tonia's father is tricked into buying unproductive land, while Jim lives on his grandfather's propserous farm. When An'toni'a's father can not make the farm productive, he commits suicide, leaving his vulgar, nagging wife, their grown son Ambrosch, the adolescent An'toni'a and her young sister Yulka and the idiot boy Marck.

An'toni'a is employed by Jim's grandfather and has to work in the fields. She later becomes a maid in various households. Jim attends the state university and Harvard. An'toni'a eventually works on her brother's farm and then marries the mild, friendly Anton Cuzak. They have many children.

Twenty years later when Jim visits Nebraska he finds An'toni'a a stalwart, middle-aged farm wife, but she still possesses the laughter and inner core of pioneer integrity which always distinguished her.

I think I was most impressed in this novel with how the first pioneering women like An'toni'a made sacrifices in their lives so that their sisters and daughters could live the privileged lives that they now do.