> Skip to content
  • Published: 4 March 2014
  • ISBN: 9780451466266
  • Imprint: Signet
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $12.99

My Ántonia




One of the books that defines the phrase "great American novel," now with a new afterword.

Beloved American novelist Willa Cather’s nostalgic classic about life on the Midwest prairie.

Emigrating from Bohemia to Black Hawk, Nebraska, with her family, Ántonia discovers no white-framed farmhouse or snug barn. Instead, the cultured Shimerda family finds itself huddled in a primitive sod house buffeted by the ceaselessly blowing winds on the Midwest prairie. For her childhood friend Jim Burden, Ántonia comes to embody the elemental spirit of this frontier. Working alongside men, she survives without compromising the rich, deep power of her nature. And Willa Cather’s lush descriptions of the rolling Nebraska grasslands interweave with the blossoming of a woman in the early days of the twentieth century in a novel that is an epic chronicle of America’s past. The novel Cather herself considered her best, My Ántonia is one of those rare, highly prized works of great literature that not only enriches its readers but immerses them in a tale superbly told.

With an Introduction by Marilyn Sides
and an Afterword by Terese Svoboda

  • Published: 4 March 2014
  • ISBN: 9780451466266
  • Imprint: Signet
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $12.99

About the author

Willa Cather

Willa Cather was a Pulitzer prize-winning American writer, best known for her novels of Nebraskan frontier life. Born in 1873 near Winchester, Virginia, she moved with her family to Catherton, Nebraska in 1883, and the landscape went on to have a formative effect on her. Before becoming a full-time writer, Cather worked as a journalist, a magazine editor and a teacher.


Her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, was published in 1912, followed by titles including O Pioneers! (1913); The Song of the Lark (1915); My Ántonia (1918); One of Ours (1922), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize; Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). She died in New York in 1947.

Also by Willa Cather

See all

Praise for My Ántonia

“No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia. It is the finest thing of its sort ever done in America.”—H. L. Mencken  “Can one name another American novel whose emotional quality is so true, so warm, so human as that of My Ántonia.”—Clifton Fadiman  “To reread Cather is to rediscover an arresting chapter in the national past.”—Los Angeles Times  “The time will come when she'll be ranked above Hemingway.”—Leon Edel