Willa Cather's most famous novel was published only two months before the Armistice ended the bloodshed of the Great War, and in its powerfully imagistic portrait of Midwestern homesteading, it offered readers an emotional connection to the nation's founding myth of pioneer fortitude. Yet My Ántonia wasn't just a story about pilgrims' progress across the prairies: it was a story of immigrants struggling to realize the American Dream that appeared in an era of extreme xenophobia that will feel painfully resonant to contemporary readers. In telling the story of the resilient Ántonia Shimerda and other "hired girls" from Bohemia (the modern-day Czech Republic) and other Eastern European states, Cather paid tribute to real-life migrants she had grown up with in Red Cloud, Nebraska, a small but artistically vibrant train depot that today does a thriving business in Cather tourism. In addition to Cather's powerful style and her warm memories of farming struggles, we focus on the friendship between Ántonia and the orphaned narrator, Jim Burden. At the end of the day, My Ántonia is possibly the greatest story about a platonic friendship between a woman and a man in American literature.
Episode 28: Falling off the Cliff with The Catcher in the Rye
Episode 27: Filtering the Static in Don DeLillo's WHITE NOISE
Episode 26: Seekers of the Lonely Heart: Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Episode 25: Surmising the Motives in Henry James's THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
Episode 24: Speeding Down the Highway with PLAY IT AS IT LAYS by Joan Didion
Episode 23: Hearing Voices in William Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING
Episode 22: Rambling Along the REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
Defining Dignity through Service in Ernest J. Gaines' A LESSON BEFORE DYING
Episode 20: Cracking Through the Scrub with THE YEARLING
Episode 19: Riding the Rocket with Thomas Pynchon's GRAVITY'S RAINBOW
Episode 18: We Want to Fly Away with Chopin's THE AWAKENING
Ep 17: Pursuing the Picaro in Saul Bellow's THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH
Episode 16: Classics of American Noir
Searching for the Ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck's THE GRAPES OF WRATH
Episode 14: Ride into the sun--Cormac McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN
Episode 12: Hitting the Road with LOLITA
The Everyday Ecstasy of Marilynne Robinsone's GILEAD
Episode 10: Finding the Lost Generation in Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES
Episode 9: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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