Now, a Literary Moment...

General Colin Powell was raised in New York’s South Bronx BY parents who emigrated from Jamaica. As a young man, he fell in love with an unlikely novel --- My Ántonia by Willa Cather. In it, he saw and felt something foreign---and yet familiar.

Colin Powell: So there I was, a kid about 14 years old, reading this book. And suddenly, I was no longer in New York City. I was out in a place that I had never heard of before, never had any understanding of. Out in the Great Plains. With the agriculture sweeping out in all directions, with sod houses, with immigrants just like my parents were. And so, for that instant, I was transported almost two thousand miles away to a new place, a new land, but the common experience was there of immigrants , trying to make a new life for themselves in America.

This Literary Moment was created by the National Endowment for the Arts