Both these writers knew the harshness and cruelty of plain folks, as wellĪs the heart-filling kindnesses of the same. Stretch-early twentieth-century American and communist writers are seldom compared-but there are definite parallels in the hard-scrabble experiences of their subjects. Reminds me of any other writer, it's Maxim Gorky in My Childhood, his memoir of growing up in a Russian village. Unsophisticated girl he has been in love with since childhood.
The story is narrated by an American-born maleįriend who gains success in New York but reminisces about the
The title character is Ántonia (stress on the first syllable as in Antony) Shimerda and, while all that pioneering stuff does happen to her mid-European family in rural Nebraska, she and her friends are interesting enough to keep you turning the pages as you laugh and weep your way through their growth from children to adulthood. Some overcome hardship, others don't.īut forget all that. Immigrants set up house and farm in the new land, discover the country is harsh, the weather unforgiving. Like one of those dreary, early Canadian novels some of us had to read in school about settlers in rural North America.
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