Additional Details ------------------------------ Product description: A beloved American classic, Willa Cather's My Antonia (1918) is best summarized by its epigraph: "the best days are the first to flee." In it, the adult narrator, Jim Burden, remembers his childhood through the memory of his friend, Antonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant. As Cather herself did, ten-year-old Jim has left Virginia for Nebraska by train and is shocked by the barren prairie on his first wagon ride. Unlike Cather, Jim is an orphan joining his paternal grandparents on the Nebraska Divide. The novel comprises five sections, called "books" by the author, and may appear at first to lack a cohesive structure. As Cather intended, there is no plot in the usual sense of the word. Instead, each book contains thematic contrasts. Book One, for example, begins with an idyllic autumn of exploration for Jim and Antonia; it ends with a bitter winter and an unforeseen family tragedy that changes Antonia's life forever. In Book Two, Jim's family leaves the prairie for the small town of Black Hawk, where many of the young immigrant women help alleviate their families financial hardships by becoming the town's "hired girls". After Jim leaves Black Hawk to attend the University of Nebraska, he reunites with Norwegian Lena Lingard, who has become a successful dressmaker in Lincoln. He flees to Boston to avoid a lasting romance with her. The novel owes its enduring appeal partly to its universal themes of time, death, youth, and friendship. Children grow up and lose their innocence; the virgin land becomes productive but fenced. The character of Antonia Shimerda embodied all Cather's feelings about the early immigrants to the prairie country. Cathe's later story, "Neighbor Rosicky" (from 1931's Obscure Destinies), centers on the quiet kindnesses of a Bohemian farmer at the end of his life?a man based upon Anna's husband, with whom she bore twelve children.