My Ántonia is the most autobiographical of Willa Cather’s novels, with many parallels between her life story and the experiences of the book’s narrator, Jim Burden. However, rather than creating a semi-autobiographical novel that closely followed her life’s events, Cather drew on elements of her memories and crafted them into a story about a unique character with his own history and inner world.

There are some basic similarities between the author and her protagonist. Like Jim Burden, Cather was born on a farm in Virginia in the 19th century, and her paternal grandparents moved to the Nebraskan frontier in order to homestead. Nine-year-old Cather joined her grandparents on their prairie farm after the deaths of several relatives in Virginia; in contrast to the fictional Jim, Cather was not orphaned, but relocated to Nebraska with her parents, three siblings, and other family members. The biography on the Willa Cather website quotes Cather’s first impressions of the prairie that resemble Jim’s thoughts in the novel: “The land was open range and there was almost no fencing. As we drove further and further out into the country, I felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything—it was a kind of erasure of personality.