My Ántonia - Willa Cather Audiobook

Written by Willa Cather
Read by George Guidall
Format: MP3
Unabridged

Author: Willa Cather
Narrator: George Guidall
Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
Audio Length: 8.5 hours
Release Date: December 2016
Format: Audiobook

Antonia Shimerdas moves to the harsh Nebraska heartland with her impoverished Bohemian family when she is still a girl. For young Jim Burden, who lives with his grandparents on a homestead nearby, Antonia is an embodiment of the female pioneer-self-sufficient, vigorous, and determined to withstand the daily challenges of maintaining home and family in a primitive countryside. When Jim grows up, his memories return to Antonia. In his effort to understand what she meant to him, he creates an enduring picture of the American frontier and of a woman of unusual spirit.

The story of Antonia Shimerda is told by one of her friends from childhood, Jim Burden, an orphaned boy from Virginia. Though he leaves the prairie, Jim never forgets the Bohemian girl who so profoundly influenced his life. An immigrant child of immigrant parents, Antonia’s girlhood is spent working to help her parents wrest a living from the untamed land. Though in later years she suffers betrayal and desertion, through all the hardships of her life she preserves a valor of spirit that no hardship can daunt or break. When Jim Burden sees her again after many years, he finds her “a rich mine of life”, a figure who has turned adversity into a particular kind of triumph in the true spirit of the pioneer.

Willa Cather (1873–1947), the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of more than fifteen books, is widely considered one of the major fiction writers of the twentieth century. She grew up in Nebraska and is best known for her depictions of frontier life on the Great Plains in novels such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Song of the Lark. In 1944 she was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours.

George Guidall, winner of more than eighty AudioFile Earphones Awards, has won three of the prestigious Audie Award for Excellence in Audiobook Narration. In 2014 the Audio Publishers Association presented him with the Special Achievement Award for lifetime achievement/ During his thirty-year recording career he has recorded over 1,700 audiobooks, won multiple awards, been a mentor to many narrators, and shown by example the potential of fine storytelling. His forty-year acting career includes starring roles on Broadway, an Obie Award for best performance off Broadway, and frequent television appearances.