My Ántonia

Um, Lawrence, uh- Yeah, a big yes for this one.

This is a novel, uh, by Willa Cather called My Ántonia.

It's a bit of a corrective for me to the Kingsolver.

It was from 1918, and it's about life on the Great Prairie in Nebraska.

A single marriage, a bit of gossip, or a financial debt ripples through the town's family microcosms and alters the entire community.

On the American frontier, we have Willa Cather's My Ántonia.

It immortalizes the Midwest and the lives of immigrant frontier neighbors settling the harsh Nebraska landscape.

The family here is trying to tame the march of change on the land itself while wrestling with nostalgia for the past.

Uh, I wonder if you'd read this from Willa Cather.

So this is Willa Cather's My Ántonia.

"I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away.

The light and air about me told me that the world ended here.

That, you know, you don't have to be Nebraskan to be offended by this.

R- Red Cloud is, uh, it's where Willa Cather, one of the, our greatest novelists, uh, lived as a girl.

The, her childhood home is there.

It's a national historic site.

Some of the characters are reading that book in the book, and the way they were talking about it made me interested in it.

Willa Cather's probably well-known, but I think a lot of people talk about her book O Pioneers or My Antonia.

Yeah.

This is about the American Southwest, and I believe it's about some political happenings within the church there.

That's so unliterary.

In My Antonia, the heroine's father, a Czech immigrant, if this were a classic settler colonialist text, they would thrive and be happy.

No, they come to Nebraska.

And on a cold winter's night, he goes out and kills himself because he's so homesick and so lonely.

And why, also, when I was young and first read her, I thought, oh, this is kind of boring.

I don't know where this is going.

You know, my Antonia or Death Comes Through the Archbishop are filled with episodic little tales, and they don't seem to add up to anything.

Well, looked at in the context of grand ideologies and narratives like manifest destiny, wow, that's a profound thing.

So the first one, obviously we've talked at length about, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton.

Then My Ántonia by Willa Cather, Native Son by Richard Wright, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which that last one is not exactly a classic, but [laughs] it's one that I've been meaning to read for a while, and also I thought it was important to include an indigenous work in my personal curriculum about American literature, so.

It doesn't seem too soon to call that a hugely influential American book.

Yeah, I would agree with that-