My Antonia - Willa Cather

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Résumé :
After the death of his parents, Jim is sent to live with his grandparents on the Nebraska plains. By chance on that same train is a bright-eyed girl, Antonia, who will become his neighbor and lifelong friend. Her family has emigrated from Bohemia to start a new life farming but soon lose their money and must work hard just to survive. Through it all, Antonia retains her natural pride and free spirit. Jim's grandparents have a large and tidy farm. They are kind to him, but conventional. Later Jim becomes a scholar and Antonia becomes a 'hired girl' in town. She blossoms in the new freedom that town life offers. Jim can only taste this life vicariously through her recounting of town gossip and of the 'dance tent'. Antonia's strong will, spirit, and honesty allow her to thrive in the midst of hardship. Cather paints a rich picture of life on the prairie at the beginning of the twentieth century and depicts some of the many cultures that came to comprise the United States

Biographie:
Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 - April 24, 1947) was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My ?ntonia (1918). In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. While Cather enjoyed the novels of George Eliot, the Bront?s, and Jane Austen, she regarded most women writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental and mawkish. Cather admired Henry James as a mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives. She generally preferred past literary masters to contemporary writers. Some particular favorites were Dickens, Thackeray, Emerson, Hawthorne, Balzac, Flaubert, and Tolstoy. Although Cather began her writing career as a journalist, she made a distinction between journalism, which she saw as being primarily informative, and literature, which she saw as an art form. Cather's work is often marked by its nostalgic tone, her subject matter and themes drawn from memories of her early years on the American plains. Cather graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33 she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick.

Sommaire:
Born in 1873 in Gore, Virginia, Willa Cather moved to Nebraska at age nine, an experience that shaped her literary voice. Surrounded by immigrant settlers, she found inspiration in their resilience and the stark prairie landscape. This early exposure to frontier life became the foundation of her celebrated narratives.After graduating from the University of Nebraska in 1895, Cather worked in journalism and teaching while honing her craft. Her time at McClure's Magazine in New York helped refine her storytelling and transition into fiction. During this period, she began exploring themes of pioneer life and the human spirit.Cather gained acclaim with O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My ?ntonia (1918), which captured frontier struggles and triumphs. In 1923, she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, set during World War I. Through evocative prose and rich character studies, she became a defining voice in American literature....