My Ántonia [antikvár]

Prairie Life in My Antonia WALTER HAVIGHURST Late in her long and distinguished life Willa Gather said that the most important years to her, as a writer, were the first two years she spent in the West. This was in the 188o's, when she was about ten years old. From her memories of those years came My Antonia, which is a story of youth. It tells of young persons in a young country. Jim Burden had come from Virginia, the oldest region in America, and Antonia Shimerda had come from Bohemia (only recently called Czechoslovakia), the oldest country of central Europe. Both were awakened by moving at an early age from an old country to a new. The lives of both began again, on the wide Nebraska prairie. When Jim peered from the jolting wagon on his first night in Nebraska, he saw "nothing but land: not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made." So he and the barefoot Bohemian girl grew up with the West. From the first day Antonia seemed at home on the vast prairie. She belonged to wind and sunlight. She had generous emotions and strong qualities of heart and body, like the founders of early races. She, too, was the material out of which countries are made. Childhood on the prairie was very simple. There were the earth and the sky, there were plowed fields encircled by endless grassland, there were the slowly turning seasons. The prairie rolled to the horizon, rising and dipping in long undulations, like the ocean after a storm. It dropped into dry creek-beds called "draws" or "arroyos," where poplar leaves rustled in the wind and buffalo peas grew rank and tangled; it lifted into long grassy ridges that lay against the sky. In that wide land every detail