During Jim Burden’s culminating visit to the Cuzak homestead, Ántonia’s children boast that “Americans don’t have” delicacies like their spiced plums and kolaches (Czech pastries), and one of her boys plays “Bohemian airs” on the violin that Ántonia’s father had brought with him when he emigrated to Nebraska.

What is most interesting about this portrait of an unassimilated immigrant household is Cather’s somewhat paradoxical suggestion that these kinds of families will generate an American identity still in the process of being born. In fact, Cather raises this idea that the United States remains an unformed nation in the very first chapter of the novel. Recalling his first sight of the uncultivated Nebraska landscape, Jim feels that it is “not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made” (p. 11). At the end of the novel, when Jim calls his beloved Antonia “a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races” (p. 211), one cannot help thinking that Cather is elevating Antonia into a mythological figure who is both Earth Mother and the progenitor of an inchoate American culture.

During the early decades of the twentieth century, many American writers believed that they could rejuvenate the national self-image by placing such nineteenth-century figures as Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville at the center of a newly configured American literary tradition now taken for granted. In 1925 Cather staked her own claim to a revised national canon, asserting that the “three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life” (quoted in Orvell, “Time, Change, and the Burden of Revision in My Ántonia,” p. 31) are Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs. Like Cather’s prairie novels, all of these works are firmly grounded in regional American subject matter, and Cather is implicitly claiming a place for herself in this distinctively American tradition of writing. Including Jewett’s 1896 work in this lineage was provocative, not only because of the tendency to marginalize women writers, but also because Jewett was not at the time considered a major figure. Cather was not uniformly friendly, however, to women writers, many of whom she found too “feminine.” She admired those she considered truly great, such as Jane Austen and George Eliot, but she also declared, “I have not much faith in women in fiction. They have a sort of sex consciousness that is abominable” (The World and the Parish, p. 276). Cather was, for instance, quite critical of Kate Chopin, going so far as to attack The Awakening (1899) for its “unbalanced idealism” (Stories, Poems, and Other Writings, p. 912). Although she created strong female characters in her prairie novels, Cather was more interested in asserting her right to participate in a male literary tradition than in promoting an alternative female canon.

By including Jewett in her very selective pantheon of literary predecessors, Cather was paying tribute to a woman whose literary example and personal friendship played a significant role at an important juncture in Cather’s life. Although Jewett and Cather did not meet until the year before Jewett’s death in 1909, their friendship and correspondence should not be underestimated. For one thing, Jewett was instrumental in persuading Cather to leave McClure’s in order to devote herself to what Jewett called “the thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper” (quoted in Stories, Poems, and Other Writings, p. 849)—that is, to literature and not to the journalism upon which Cather herself feared her creative energies were being squandered. Crucially, Jewett also encouraged Cather to draw more directly upon her formative years in Nebraska. Like the cultural critics in revolt against the genteel tradition, Jewett was a strong proponent of grounding literature in the local and the ordinary, and her unsentimental depictions of the quietly heroic women of rural Maine in The Country of the Pointed Firs are unmistakable models for the resilient heroines of Cather’s prairie novels. When she met Jewett, Cather was still trying to emulate the “transatlantic” fiction of Henry James. Jewett, however, predicted that “one day you will write about your own country. In the meantime, get all you can. One must know the world so well before one can know the parish” (Stories, Poems, and Other Writings, p. 942).

It took quite some time before Cather returned in her fiction to her childhood “parish,” Nebraska’s Webster County. Like the narrator of My Ántonia, Cather was displaced from her original Virginia home as a young child and taken to a recently settled region of Nebraska. After about a year, the Cathers moved to nearby Red Cloud, which is the prototype for all the small towns in Cather’s prairie novels: Hanover in O Pioneers!; Black Hawk, to which Jim moves with his grandparents in My Ántonia; and Moonstone, the Colorado town where Thea Kronborg begins her life as an artist in The Song of the Lark. In both town and countryside, Cather was intrigued by the foreign immigrants who play such a central role in these novels. The story of the Shimerdas that dominates the first section of My Ántonia recapitulates many of the travails faced by the Sadileks, the Czech family who lived near the Cathers on the Divide. Like the forlorn Mr. Shimerda, Frank Sadilek was a violinist who committed suicide during a brutal winter, and his daughter Annie, the source for Antonia, gave birth to a daughter after being abandoned by a manipulative railroad man who had promised to marry her.

My Ántonia reproduces these and many other details of Cather’s early life, though it is not as intensely autobiographical as The Song of the Lark. For one thing, although Cather and Jim both move in with their grandparents on the Divide, Cather was accompanied by her parents and was not, like Jim, an orphan.