In the midst of reading Willa Cather’s most beloved novel, My Antonia, first published in 1918, it becomes immediately clear why this piece of fiction is so often selected as a representative sampling of the Great American Novel. The author draws on her own childhood experience to conjure up life in the stunning, waving Midwest Nebraskan plains, a landscape so central to the heart of the American way that it literally takes place in the middle of the country.
I was struck while reading Book 1 just how vividly Cather conveyed the real struggles of living in such a harsh environment by the early 20th century. I decided to look up more about the writer to find out where she might have gotten some of her ideas, and it came to no surprise that I found this rather useful biography of Willa Cather online that explicitly credits her early life as being instrumental to inspiring her creative work as an adult. It discloses that she lived through her early life in Back Creek, Virginia, before moving in the late 1800’s into Catherton, Nebraska, to live with her family as a pioneer, which, as you all know, is nearly identical to the backstory of Jim Burden in the fictional account Cather wrote about her formative years. Though the plot of her best selling novel was fabricated, the inclusion of the foreign immigrant experience into her work was a very deliberate choice on Cather’s part to highlight some of the real characters present in her own life, only re-purposed under different names. It becomes clear through her accounts in her prose that this version of America she is presenting for her readers is near and dear to her heart, and that her piece of fiction was written to honor the America she knew, both in the resplendent countryside and the remarkable people that she knew from her time as a young girl.
If you have the time, I highly suggest taking a quick look through this website, purely dedicated to memorializing Willa Cather and her accomplishments. If you’re looking for something that purely encapsulates the world in which our author wrote, this text is full of biographical factoids and explanations about where some of her ideas may have come from, and it points out all the puzzle pieces in her past that she made fit inside her works of fiction. You see a lot of what inspired My Antonia to turn out the way it did. As Cather herself narrates in the opening chapters of the novel, and as was inevitably inscribed on Cather’s own headstone, “That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
Thanks for this introduction to a fascinating piece of Cather’s background. As we will discuss, there are many continuities between the narrative fiction of My Antonia and her own life–with some important changes as well (such as the gender of the narrator).
For these NovelWorlds posts, try to really sink into something a bit more specific. Much of this post is an encouragement to read more, but the best posts in this category will give us a concrete piece of the past–or a critical article about some contextual aspect–that brings the novel to life. Here, you might have detailed, a bit more, Cather’s early life and move to Nebraska to more fully give a sense of the parallels between life and fiction and how that might influence our reading of the novel.
Also, I embedded the link you included at the top (so the text is clickable rather than the URL visible). I also recommend adding a picture here to fill things out.