Recommendations
Books Like My Antonia
Best books to read after My Antonia by Willa Cather
My Antonia is Cather's most beloved novel — the story of the Bohemian immigrant Antonia Shimerda as remembered by Jim Burden, who grew up alongside her on the Nebraska prairie. If the novel's lyrical evocation of the Great Plains and its elegy for the immigrant experience moved you, these books share its love of the American land, its portrait of people who make their lives through hard physical work, and its conviction that beauty and loss are inseparable.
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O Pioneers!
by Willa Cather
Cather's immediate predecessor to My Antonia and the first of her Nebraska novels — the story of Alexandra Bergson, who inherits her father's prairie farm and succeeds where her brothers cannot; the most openly feminist of Cather's prairie novels and the essential companion, typically read before My Antonia to see the development of her prairie vision
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Death Comes for the Archbishop
by Willa Cather
Cather's most celebrated later novel — the story of Bishop Lamy's establishment of the Catholic diocese of New Mexico in the 1850s; the companion to My Antonia in its portrait of European sensibility encountering the American landscape, but set in the Southwest rather than the plains and written in a deliberately simple, episodic 'legend' style
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Giants in the Earth
by Ole Edvart Rølvaag
Rølvaag's Norwegian-American novel about Norwegian immigrants settling the Dakota prairie — the essential dark companion to My Antonia; where Cather's novel is elegiac and life-affirming, Rølvaag's is tragic, showing what the same prairie landscape cost the people who could not make peace with it; both are essential to the full picture of the immigrant prairie experience
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The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck's masterpiece about the Joad family's migration from Oklahoma to California shares My Antonia's concern with what happens to people uprooted from the land they have made their lives on — but where My Antonia is about the immigrant who comes and stays, The Grapes of Wrath is about those who come and are expelled by economic forces they cannot control
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A Thousand Acres
by Jane Smiley
Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a Iowa farm family's King Lear-like disintegration shares My Antonia's portrait of the American farm as both a physical and moral landscape; where Cather's prairie is ultimately life-giving, Smiley's is the site of hidden violence and inheritance's terrible costs
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Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson
Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an Iowa minister writing a letter to his young son is the contemporary fiction closest to My Antonia in its love of the American Midwest and its conviction that the lives of people in small places matter as much as the lives of people in great ones; both are elegies for a world of ordinary human virtue and beauty
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True Grit
by Charles Portis
Portis's novel — narrated by the fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross, who tracks down her father's killer with the help of a drunken US Marshal — shares My Antonia's portrait of a woman who is the most capable person in her world, remembered and told in retrospect by a narrator who understands the gap between what she was and how the world tried to define her
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The Song of the Lark
by Willa Cather
Cather's most ambitious novel — the rise of the opera singer Thea Kronborg from a Colorado small town to Carnegie Hall; the companion to My Antonia in its portrait of a woman of exceptional nature and the landscape that formed her, but focused on artistic ambition rather than agricultural endurance; essential for readers who want the full range of Cather's vision
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