_My Antonia_ is a book to be put alongside _O Pioneers!_ It is less epical but of more historical value for its minute and colorful depiction of life on the Nebraska prairies and in the Nebraska towns about 1885. The book is really a chronicle of people and their surroundings, a mosaic of character sketches and scenes and short stories brought within a single ken. The material ranges from tragedy, horror and repellent occurrences to pathos, humor and farce. It is perfectly handled, however; the reader is never offended and is variously touched and amused--and always the book is engrossing. Such a book is worth a dozen formal historical records. And the figure of Antonia Cuzak is a biographical triumph. Reminiscence here surpasses fiction.
There is no more to be said and it may easily be that too much has been said already. If this chapter has been too venturesome in its inferences and too declamatory in its exposition, forgive that, O reader! If you have read Miss Cather’s notable novels you may disagree but you will understand and condone; if you have not read them you will be more indulgent toward us after doing so; and actually if what we have said shall lead you to read her books the whole of our striving will have been fulfilled. She is a novelist whose work already adds measurably to American literature; whether all of us put the same estimate upon her accomplishment does not matter at all; it matters supremely that as many of us as possible should be acquainted with it.
_April Twilights_, 1903. R. G. Badger, Boston. _The Troll Garden_, 1905. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York. _Alexander’s Bridge_, 1912. _O Pioneers!_ 1913. _The Song of the Lark_, 1915. _My Antonia_, 1918. _Youth and the Bright Medusa_, 1920. _One of Ours_, 1922.
_Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, but Youth and the Bright Medusa and One of Ours are published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York._
To write twenty-six books is something, is it not? To have written twenty-six books which have sold half a million copies (the publisher’s offhand guess) is something else again and more. Clara Louise Burnham has done that; and the cold arithmetical statement does not begin to convey the real nature of her achievement. You must read her to know how capable a novelist she is, how expert, how gifted with humor, insight, fertility in those slight inventions which make up the reality of a fictionist’s whole. Mrs. Burnham’s writings are associated in the minds of many thousands who have not read her tales, or have read only a few of them, with the doctrines of Christian Science. And it is true that she is the author of several novels in which the principles of this faith are of the essence of the stories. Equally true is it that she has said of her book, _Jewel_: