And scenes such as the one where Jim heroically - at least to Antonia - bashes the head of a rattlesnake with his spade remain with us, so startling were they when we first read them. We still despise the evil money-lender Wick Cutter. We feel enduring fondness for Lena, the dressmaker.

We recall characters like the Russian friends, Pavel and Peter, with haunted clarity. We remember Jim Burden, who recounts Antonia's adventures as well as those of his own rural childhood with affection. We feel comfortable leaving it safely, fondly stored in our memory banks, rickety as they may be, where it remains a humane story about a courageous Bohemian immigrant girl forced by fate and family exigencies to grow up on the beautiful, harsh flatlands of Nebraska. In particular, her best-known work, My Antonia, a novel we often first encounter as young adult literature, is a book many of us actually enjoyed in our youth. Willa Cather, one of the truly great American writers of the 20th century, suffers, as I see it, from a somewhat different kind of expulsion from the lives of many adults, even those who go on to become serious readers. How easy it is to litter our youthful path with a slew of misunderstood masters! With a mental flick of the wrist, we dismiss as drudges, romantics and windbags writers we may later come to realize are crucial to us. How many of us have been assigned a book to read for a high school English class by a well-intentioned teacher and come away from the experience thinking, with all the conviction of heady youth, 'Thank God I'll never have to read that again'?

My antonia book 5