Jim and Antonia come to the Nebraska plain from different places in the social hierarchy and from different parts of the world. Orphaned at the age of ten, Jim leaves his parents' Virginia home to live with his grandparents on their comfortable Nebraska farm. Arriving in America from Bohemia with her family, fourteen-year-old Antonia faces linguistic and cultural barriers as well as ethnic tensions common to first-generation pioneer immigrants. Early in her friendship with Jim, Antonia highlights their differences. ''but they will be hard for us''.
That Jim will attend school is a given. When he invites Antonia to join him at the country school, she refuses because of her responsibilities on the farm. ''I am not got time to learn,'' she tell s him. ''School is all right for little boys. I help make this land one good farm''. Although Antonia says that she admires her father's learning, she takes pride in her work on the farm.
Jim attends high school and college. The summer before he enters law school, he returns to his hometown and pays a visit to Antonia. She asks Jim about life in the city. '' I'd always be miserable in a city,'' she tell s him. ''I'd die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I know every stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly. I want to live and die here''.
Revisiting Nebraska, Jim feels ''the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there ''.Jim still seems to be searching for the emotional significance of his childhood experience, whereas Antonia cherishes her memories without Jim's romantic longing for the past. ''I am not it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other?'' she says before they part. ''You'll always remember me when you think about old times, won't you?''.
Twenty years after this visit, Jim returns to spend a day and night with Antonia and her family. He contrasts his unsatisfactory adulthood with Antonia's apparent fulfillment as a farmer's wife and mother of many children. He sees that Antonia is grounded in something strong and permanent, whereas his life is marked by constant travel. In spite of material successes, he has failed to find happiness either in his marriage or in his career as a lawyer for a railroad company.
Jim begins to understand the emotional significance of their differences, of their experience together, and of his rich childhood. Tracing his steps on the road that he and Antonia traveled as children, Jim has ''the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is. For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the in communicable past''.