Overview

""A direct, human tale of love and struggle and attainment-American in the best sense of the word.""-The New York Times On the windy Nebraska prairie, Alexandra Bergson tends to the failing farm that she inherited from her father. She struggles to raise her brothers on her own. And she is torn by the emergence of an unexpected passion... A magnificent story, O Pioneers!-Willa Cather's second novel-has become one of the great classics of American literature, telling a timeless tale of a strong pioneer woman facing extraordinary challenges and conflicts, shining a light on the immigrant experience, and, with its simple, beautiful prose, revealing the emerging voice of one of our greatest authors. With an Introduction by Marcelle Clements and an Afterword by Lan Samantha Chang

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9780451532121

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Reviews

The land belongs to the future... that's the way it seems to me....I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it -- for a little while. O Pioneers! (1913) was Willa Cather's first great novel, and to many it remains her unchallenged masterpiece. No other work of fiction so faithfully conveys both the sharp physical realities and the mythic sweep of the transformation of the American frontier -- and the transformation of the people who settled it. Cather's heroine is Alexandra Bergson, who arrives on the wind-blasted prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, as a girl and grows up to make it a prosperous farm. But this archetypal success story is darkened by loss, and Alexandra's devotion to the land may come at the cost of love itself. At once a sophisticated pastoral and a prototype for later feminist novels, O Pioneers! is a work in which triumph is inextricably enmeshed with tragedy, a story of people who do not claim a land so much as they submit to it and, in the process, become greater than they were.

""To reread Cather is to rediscover an arresting chapter in the national past.""—Los Angeles Times ""The time will come when she'll be ranked above Hemingway.""—Leon Edel

Author Information

Willa Cather(1873-1948) was born in Winchester, Virginia. Her family moved to Nebraska before she was ten. During her teens she learned both Latin and Greek; she graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1895. She then taught high school, worked for the PittsburghLeader, and spent a good deal of time traveling.The Troll Garden(1905) was her first volume of short stories, and it was followed by her appointment as associate editor ofMcClure'sMagazine. She continued in this position for six years, but resigned in 1912 because she felt that the work for the magazine was interfering with her writing.Alexander's Bridge, a short novel set in Boston, was published in the same year. InO Pioneers!(1913), she turned to her greatest subject, immigrant life on the Nebraska prairies, and established herself as a major American novelist.O Pioneers!was followed by more novels, includingMy ntonia(1918),The Professor's House(1922), andDeath Comes for the Archbishop(1927). Cather lived in New York for many years, and she was a familiar figure in intellectual and literary circles.The Old Beauty and Others, a collection of short stories, was published posthumously. Marcelle Clements is a novelist and journalist who has contributed articles on culture, the arts, and politics to many national publications. She is the author of two books of nonfiction, The Dog Is Usand The Improvised Woman, and the novels Rock Me and Midsummer. Lan Samantha Chang is the author of the award-winning books Hunger and Inheritence. A 2008 Guggenheim fellow, she lives with her husband and daughter in Iowa City, Iowa, where she is the director of the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her most recent novel is All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost.

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