My Antonia: A PDF-style e-book

Willa Cather

Aug 2012 · Sold by Macmillan Higher Education

About this ebook

This student edition presents Willa Cather’s landmark novel of immigrant life on the American prairies in a compact and affordable format. The text of the 1918 first edition is lightly annotated, and is accompanied by a chronology of the life of the author, an illustrated introduction to the contexts and major issues of the text in its time and ours, an annotated bibliography for further reading (contexts, criticism, and online resources), and a concise glossary of literary terms. The text of the work is also accessible online at an accompanying Web site (visit bedfordstmartins.com/americanlit), where it can be searched electronically.

About the author

Willa Siebert Cather was born in 1873 in the home of her maternal grandmother in western Virginia. Although she had been named Willela, her family always called her "Willa." Upon graduating from the University of Nebraska in 1895, Cather moved to Pittsburgh where she worked as a journalist and teacher while beginning her writing career. In 1906, Cather moved to New York to become a leading magazine editor at McClure's Magazine before turning to writing full-time. She continued her education, receiving her doctorate of letters from the University of Nebraska in 1917, and honorary degrees from the University of Michigan, the University of California, Columbia, Yale, and Princeton. Cather wrote poetry, short stories, essays, and novels, winning awards including the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, One of Ours, about a Nebraska farm boy during World War I. She also wrote The Professor's House, My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Lucy Gayheart. Some of Cather's novels were made into movies, the most well-known being A Lost Lady, starring Barbara Stanwyck. In 1961, Willa Cather was the first woman ever voted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame. She was also inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners in Oklahoma in 1974, and the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca, New York in 1988. Cather died on April 24, 1947, of a cerebral hemorrhage, in her Madison Avenue, New York home, where she had lived for many years.