Now, a Literary Moment...

The Great Plains ---with its small towns, isolated farms and endless prairies was an unusual subject for a popular novel in 1918. But in My Antonia, author Willa Cather celebrated that desolate terrain with loving detail.

Ted Kooser: Well, I’ve lived in Nebraska for over 40 years now.

Former U.S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser.

Ted Kooser: She’s right on with the description of prairie grasses and the colors. I would know where I was from reading that.

Writer and host of Prairie Home Companion Garrison Keillor reads fom My Ántonia.

Garrison Keilllor: “I used to love to drift along the pale yellow cornfields looking for the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smart weed soon turned a rich copper color. And the narrow, brown leaves hung curled like cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Trees were so rare in that country and they had to make such a hard fight to grow that we used to feel anxious about them and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the scarcity of detail on that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.”

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