'My Antonia' was first published in 1918. It was Willa Cather's fourth novel and her first recognized masterwork. The book follows the parallel stories of Antonia Shimerdas, a Bohemian immigrant, and the orphan Jim Burden, viewing their lives from childhood to middle age, and allowing the author to reveal the glories and hardship of farm life on the vast American Plains, from the joys of an early spring day to the tragedy of suicide. Literary essayist H L Mencken considered Cather an extraordinary novelist: "'My Antonia' is the best piece of fiction ever done by a woman in America...I know of no novel that makes the remote fold of the western farmlands more real..." , an appraisal that is as valid now as when it was first penned in 1920.