My Ántonia

My Antonia is a novel by the American writer Willa Cather, first published in 1918. It is the last novel in her Prairie trilogy, after O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark.

The book tells the stories of several immigrant families who move to rural Nebraska to begin new lives, and it focuses on the Bohemian Shimerdas and their eldest daughter, Antonia. Jim Burden, the narrator, arrives in the fictional town of Black Hawk on the same train as the Shimerdas and goes to live with his grandparents after the deaths of his parents, while Antonia's family is settling in the same place at the same time. The first year in such a new country leaves strong impressions on both children and affects them for the rest of their lives, and Jim's feelings for Antonia settle somewhere between a boyhood crush and the attachment of a member of the family. The novel follows the two of them into adulthood, largely through Jim's memory of the prairie and the people who settled it, and the title is his way of claiming her as his own.

Cather was praised for bringing the American West to life in her novels, and the name Antonia is Bohemian, accented on the first syllable in the Czech manner.