families in American literature; "it was a radical aesthetic move for Cather to feature lower-class, immigrant 'hired girls.'" Cather also makes a number of comments concerning her views on women's rights, and there are many disguised sexual metaphors in the text.My Ántonia is a selection of The Big Read, the community-wide reading program of The National Endowment for the Arts. For the communities and books in the program since 2007, see History of the program since 2007. Writing in February 2020, critic and essayist Robert Christgau called My Ántonia a "magnificent, still too obscure novel" and said it "scrupulously documents the facts and foibles of farming as way of life and means of production, although not in the detail of O Pioneers!" When author and columnist Rebecca Traister was asked by Ezra Klein during his New York Times podcast on March 19, 2021, if there was a book she rereads for the “sheer beauty of the prose” Traister was emphatic: “For the beauty of the writing, I mean, I would say that my go-to is actually My Antonia by Willa Cather, which is a book I first read in high school and found slightly boring but beautiful, and then read again in my 20s and was just totally enraptured by and then have gone back to again and again and again as a beautiful piece of writing.” Publication history The novel was shaped by the contribution of Viola Roseboro', Cather's editor at McClure's Magazine, who read the original manuscript after it had been repeatedly rejected, and told Cather that she should rewrite it from Jim's viewpoint. The 1918 version of My Antonia begins with an Introduction in which an author-narrator, supposed to be Cather herself, converses with her adult friend, Jim Burden, during a train journey. Jim is now a successful New York lawyer but trapped in an unhappy and childless marriage to a wealthy, activist woman. Cather agreed with her publisher at Houghton Mifflin to cut that introduction when a revised edition of the novel was published in 1926. A brief introduction with Jim taking that train ride, speaking with an unnamed woman who also knew Ántonia about writing about her, is included in the version at Project Gutenberg. Allusions to the novel Douglas Sirk's film, The Tarnished Angels, makes reference to My Ántonia as the last book read 12 years earlier by heroine, LaVerne, played by Dorothy Malone.