1918 · Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston · with the original introduction
Read My Ántonia by Willa Cather online, the 1918 text with its original introduction intact.
Jim Burden, ten years old and orphaned, rides a train into Nebraska in the 1880s and meets a Bohemian girl who becomes the centre of his memory. You can read My Antonia online here free, in five books. Our prairie notes cover the sod houses, the weather and the immigrant families. Where Cather placed W. T. Benda’s eight drawings, a note tells you what they showed. Group and large-print packs are quoted on request.
- Words
- about 81,000
- Reading time
- 5 h 40 min
- Books
- 5, plus introduction
- Benda notes
- 8
- Group packs
- Quoted on request
Book I, The Shimerdas · Chapter I
Read chapter one online: the night train to Black Hawk
Chapter I is about 2,300 words. Ten minutes. Jim arrives in the dark, is lifted into a wagon, and sees nothing but land. “Not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” That line is on page 7 and people remember it for years.
I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska.
Source: Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1918, first edition. The accent on Á is Cather’s own; she asked readers to stress the first syllable.
Prairie notes
What a Nebraska farm in the 1880s actually was
Cather grew up near Red Cloud, Nebraska, which she renamed Black Hawk. She wrote for readers who had seen a prairie or had parents who had. Most readers now haven’t, so these notes sit in the margin at the first place each thing appears.
- Dugout and sod house
- The Shimerdas live in a cave cut into a bank. Jim’s grandparents have a proper frame house, and the gap between the two is the book’s first lesson in class.
- Red grass
- Big bluestem, which turns copper-red in autumn and grew higher than a boy’s head on unbroken land.
- Prairie-dog town
- A colony of burrows across an acre or more. Jim kills the rattlesnake in one, Book I, chapter VIII.
- Bohemia
- Now the western Czech Republic. The Shimerdas were among thousands of Czech families who settled Nebraska in the 1870s and 80s.
- The winter of Book I
- Snow to the eaves, cattle lost, no road open for weeks. Mr. Shimerda’s death happens inside it.
- Hired girls
- Farm daughters who went to work in town households. Book II is theirs, and Cather gives them more respect than the town does.
Editor’s note on the Benda drawings and the introduction
The 1918 first edition carried eight pen drawings by W. T. Benda, placed through the book at spots Cather chose herself. She wanted them to look like old woodcuts, plain and a bit rough. We don’t reproduce them as images. Each of the eight places gets a short note: what the drawing showed and which paragraph it faced.
The introduction is the other choice we made. In 1918 it is longer, with the narrator and Jim meeting on a train and Jim handing over a manuscript he has titled simply “Ántonia”, then adding “My”. Cather cut it down in 1926. We use 1918 because that is the book people first read, and because the scene where he adds the word is worth keeping.
The fault we fixed most often against free copies: the section numbers inside each book. One widely copied file skips Book III, chapter III and numbers the rest wrong.
Content notes
A suicide in Book I (Mr. Shimerda, in winter), a story of wolves attacking a wedding party told by Pavel and Peter, an attempted sexual assault in Book II, and period language about immigrants and one Black pianist, Blind d’Arnault, that reads badly now. Printed as written, noted where it falls.
Correction ledger
Dated changes to the Cather text
- 2023-08-21Launch. Chapter numbering in Book III checked against the 1918 page images. Whole text
- 2023-09-04
AntoniaÁntonia, accent restored in four places our import had stripped. Book I, chapters II, IV, XII; Book IV, chapter I - 2024-02-10Benda note moved to face the paragraph the 1918 drawing faced, one paragraph later than we had it. Book II, margin only
How to get packs for a club or class
Write with the details
Group size, dates, and whether you want digital, printed or large print.
We plan the reading
For My Ántonia most groups take three meetings: Book I, then Books II and III, then IV and V.
You get a quote by email
Per group size and format. Nothing is paid through this site.
Confirm, and it’s prepared
The pack prints the prairie notes and all eight Benda notes alongside the text.
Questions readers send about My Ántonia
Is it My Antonia or My Ántonia?
Cather’s title has the accent: My Ántonia, stressed on the first syllable. Our book finder finds it either way.
Do you reproduce the Benda illustrations?
Not as images. We give a note at each of the eight places they appeared in 1918, describing the drawing and why Cather wanted it there.
Which introduction do you use?
The original 1918 introduction. Cather shortened it for the 1926 reissue, and that later version is not our base text.
Group packs · quoted on request
Ask for a group-pack quote for My Ántonia
Tell us how many readers and when you meet. One of us writes back with a quote.