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 “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 Willa Cather  (1873–1948) was born in Winchester, Virginia. Her family moved to Nebraska before she was ten. During her teens she learned both Latin and Greek; she graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1895. She then taught high school, worked for the Pittsburgh Leader , and spent a good deal of time traveling. The Troll Garden (1905) was her first volume of short stories, and it was followed by her appointment as associate editor of McClure’s   Magazine . She continued in this position for six years, but resigned in 1912 because she felt that the work for the magazine was interfering with her writing. Alexander’s Bridge , a short novel set in Boston, was published in the same year. In O Pioneers! (1913), she turned to her greatest subject, immigrant life on the Nebraska prairies, and established herself as a major American novelist. O Pioneers! was followed by more novels, including My Ántonia (1918), The Professor’s House (1922), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Cather lived in New York for many years, and she was a familiar figure in intellectual and literary circles. The Old Beauty and Others , a collection of short stories, was published posthumously. Marilyn Sides is the author of a collection of short stories, The Island of the Mapmaker's Wife and Other Tales , and of a novel, The Genius of Affection . She teaches literature and fiction writing at Wellesley College.   Terese Svoboda is the author of fourteen books of prose and poetry, including Bohemian Girl. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the  Atlantic, Yale Review, Poetry, Bomb, Paris Review, Harvard Review, Narrative , and many other magazines. She received a Guggenheim in 2013. I I first heard of Antonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. I travelled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the "hands" on my father's old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to work for my grandfather. Jake's experience of the world was not much wider than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we set out together to try our fortunes in a new world. We went all the way in day-coaches, becoming more sticky and grimy with each stage of the journey. Jake bought everything the newsboys offered him: candy, oranges, brass collar buttons, a watchcharm, and for me a Life of Jesse James, which I remember as one of the most satisfactory books I have ever read. Beyond Chicago we were under the protection of a friendly passenger conductor, who knew all about the country to which we were going and gave us a great deal of advice in exchange for our confidence. He seemed to us an experienced and worldly man who had been almost everywhere; in his conversation he threw out lightly the names of distant states and cities. He wore the rings and pins and badges of different fraternal orders to which he belonged. Even his cuff-buttons were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was more inscribed than an Egyptian obelisk. Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant car ahead there was a family from "across the water" whose destination was the same as ours. "They can't any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she