Set in the Nebraska landscape in a community evocative of Cather's own (Red Cloud), My Antonia tells the story of Antonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant, and Jim Burden, who like Cather was uprooted from Virginia to the Nebraska prairie. Antonia and Jim, like many of the other characters in this 1918 novel, are based on Cather's childhood friends. This Norton Critical Edition is based on the first published edition of the novel. It is accompanied by explanatory footnotes, key illustrations, an introduction that gives readers a historical overview of both author and novel, and a note on the text.

Contexts and Backgrounds is a rich collection of materials organized around the novel's central themes: Autobiographical and Biographical Writings, Letters, and Americanization and Immigration. Willa Cather, Edith Lewis, Latrobe Carroll, Rose C. Feld, Guy Reynolds, Woodrow Wilson, Peter Roberts, Horace M. Kallen, Sarka B. Hrbkova, and Rose Rosicky, among others, are included.

Criticism spans a century of scholarship on Willa Cather and My Antonia, from contemporary reviews by Henry Walcott Boynton, H. L. Mencken, and Elia W. Peattie, among others, to recent critical assessments by Terence Martin, Blanche Gelfant, Jean Schwind, Richard H. Millington, Susan Rosowski, Mike Fischer, Janis Stout, Marilee Lindemann, and Linda Joyce Brown.

A Chronology of Cather's life and work and a Selected Bibliography are also included.