My Ántonia

Why it’s on the list: Willa Cather’s 1918 novel in which Jim Burden remembers growing up on the Nebraska prairie alongside Ántonia Shimerda, the daughter of Bohemian immigrants. Almost nothing happens in the shape a novel usually requires; Cather is after the landscape and the quality of a memory kept too long and too carefully.

Where I heard about it

• Founders Classical Academy of Lewisville, Texas — on its eleventh-grade reading list, posted by the Classic Learning Test in September 2026 as an example of what a classical curriculum assigns. It closes the year’s American sequence — after Huck’s river and Melville’s ocean, the prairie. The full eight-year sequence is on Founders Classical Academy Reading List.

Connections

• Founders Classical Academy Reading List — the curriculum this came from; 56 unique titles across 5th through 12th grade.
• Classical Education — the movement whose canon this list is.
• Willa Cather
• Literature