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O Pioneers!

O Pioneers!

Summary

The first novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is an ode to the American Midwest and the immigrants who transformed it

To the anger of her brothers, it is Alexandra who is entrusted to manage their family farm in the tough, hostile prairie of Hanover, Nebraska following the death of their father. As the years pass, Alexandra rises heroically to the challenge, finding strength in the savage beauty of the land even as loneliness and personal tragedies crowd in. A rapturous work of understated lyricism, Willa Cather's 1913 tale of a pioneer woman who tames the wild, hostile lands of the Nebraskan prairie is also the story of what it means to be American.

Reviews

  • Her voice, laconical and richly sensuous, sings out with a note of unequivocal love for the people she is setting down on the page
    Marina Warner

About the author

Willa Cather

WILLA CATHER (1873-1947) was born in Virginia and was about nine years old when her family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska. After graduating from the University of Nebraska, she worked for the Nebraska State Journal, then moved to Pittsburgh and finally to New York City. There she joined McClure’s magazine. After meeting the author Sarah Orne Jewett, she decided to quit journalism and devote herself full time to fiction. Her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, appeared in 1912, but her place in American literature was established with her first Nebraska novel, O Pioneers! published in 1913, followed by her most famous pioneer novel, My Antonia, in 1918. In 1922 she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours. Her other novels include Shadows on the Rock, The Song of the Lark, The Professor’s House, My Mortal Enemy, and Lucy Gayheart. She died in 1947.

INTRODUCER BIOGRAPHY
NICHOLAS GASKILL is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at Oriel College. He is the author of Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color and editor of the The Lure of Whitehead.
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