My Antonia

Deeply rooted in a sense of time and place, Cather evokes the shaggy virgin prairie around Red Cloud, Nebraska. During the late nineteenth century, immigrants helped populate this new land. The novel has been said to be a tapestry in the colors of the land that Cather describes for us. Time is measured by the seasons that appear in distinct colors; the sunflower-border roads to the pale-yellow cornfields of summer or the shiny green of frozen asparagus, the frail green of the half-frozen insect, and the rosy haystacks of autumn. In a sense, Cather's work is a metaphor for the American pioneer experience and the prairie, the land itself, is a force as important to the novel as its characters.