My Ántonia
A Bohemian immigrant girl on the Nebraska prairie, seen through the eyes of a man who loved her without possessing her. Cather's 1918 prose is luminous and spare; its sense of place is unmatched in American literature. A feminist text before the term existed, told by a male narrator who can only see the edges of what he is missing.
Episodes, loosely strung; Ántonia vanishes from her own book for most of its middle while Jim attends college and courts Lena Lingard. Cather chose memory's shapelessness over plot, which costs the novel momentum it never recoups. And the Blind d'Arnault chapter, with its minstrel-show rendering of a Black pianist, is a genuinely hard stretch to read past now.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.