O Pioneers!

By Willa Cather

O Pioneers!, Willa Cather's first great novel, is the classic American story of pioneer life as embodied by one remarkable woman and her singular devotion to the land. Alexandra Bergson arrives on the wind-blasted prairie of Nebraska as a young girl and grows up to turn it into a prosperous farm. In this unforgettable story,Cather conveys both the physical realities of the landscape, as well as the mythic sweep of the transformation of the frontier, more faithfully and perhaps more fully than any other work of fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 1, 1997
• ISBN: 9780547623078

Willa Cather

Born in 1873, Willa Cather was raised in Virginia and Nebraska. After graduating from the University of Nebraska she established herself as a theatre critic, journalist and teacher in Pittsburgh whilst also writing short stories and poems. She then moved to New York where she took a job as an investigative journalist before becoming a full-time writer. Cather enjoyed great literary success and won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel One of Ours. She’s now best known for her Prairie trilogy: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia. She travelled extensively and died in New York in 1947.

Book preview

O Pioneers!

Willa Cather

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Foreword by

DORIS GRUMBACH

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A MARINER BOOK

Houghton Mifflin Company

BOSTON NEW YORK

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Copyright © 1913 by Willa S. Cather

Copyright renewed 1941 by the Estate of Willa S. Cather

Foreword copyright © 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from

this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,

215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicaton Data

Cather, Willa, 1873–1947.

O pioneers!

I. Title.

PS3505.A8702 1987 813'.52 87-22605 CIP

ISBN 0-395-08365-6 (pbk.)

Book design by Anne Chalmers

Type is Janson (Adobe PostScript™)

Printed in the United States of America

QUM 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23

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CONTENTS

Foreword by Doris Grumbach • [>]

PART I

The Wild Land • [>]

PART II

Neighboring Fields • [>]

PART III

Winter Memories • [>]

PART IV

The White Mulberry Tree • [>]

PART V

Alexandra • [>]

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FOREWORD

by Doris Grumbach

EVERY WRITER of fiction, it turns out, is complex, inventive, and paradoxical. Some convert their lives into fictions agreeable to their vision of themselves. (Willa Cather, we may assume, instructed Edith Lewis to place the wrong birthdate on her gravestone.) Others use autobiographical facts as the omnipresent catafalque of their fiction. Willa Cather was both kinds of writer. Her life was full of contradictions, some of which she was conscious of, and of myths which she created about herself. She used what she had experienced from the age of eight to fifteen as the material for many of her short stories and five of her novels. Her reputation, which has grown steadily since her death in 1947, rests primarily on her first four Nebraska novels. Most critics agree that it was with these that her position in the canon of enduring American novelists was secured. Many readers met her first in school through these novels; some mature people in this country have been reading O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia again and again since their childhood in the twenties.

It is often assumed that Willa Cather must have been born in Nebraska. In The Feminization of American Culture, published in 1977, Ann Douglas boldly states so. But of course this is not true. She was born in 1873 (not 1876) and spent her first nine years in Winchester, Virginia. Hers was an extended family of Boaks and Cathers; she was the first of seven children. Her parents took the family, together with her beloved grandmother, Rachel Boak, and a simple-minded servant, Margie, to the prairie on the Divide and thence, after more than a year, to Red Cloud, Nebraska, because her grandfather, who had gone west earlier, believed it would be a healthier climate for his family.

For Willa, it was psychically a traumatic move. She had loved the lush, damp greenness of the hills and great trees of Virginia In Nebraska the child saw flat, hard, tall-grassed land without any signs of human habitation. I felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything, she told an interviewer for the Philadelphia Record soon after O Pioneers! appeared in 1913. It was a kind of erasure of personality. She described the new country as bare as a piece of sheet iron and admitted: For the first week or two on the homestead I had the kind of contraction of the stomach which comes from homesickness. Nebraska, she said (through Jim Burden in My Ántonia), was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

Cather received her elementary schooling at home, from her grandmother, and she read to herself from the family's eclectic collection of books. Her enduring education, however, came from her neighbors—Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Bohemian (Czech) immigrants—whom she rode out to visit on the bleak prairie. She heard these hard-working people tell the stories of their lives. As she listened, she felt the stirrings of the state in which, years later, she wrote their histories. Later, she told the Philadelphia Record, I used to ride home in the most unreasonable state of excitement: I always felt ... as if I had actually got inside another person's skin. If one begins that early, it is the story of the man-eating tiger over again—no other adventure ever carries one quite so far.

The stories she heard, the people under whose skins she was able to get, became, in her maturity, her most successful subject matter. She heard about the suicide of Francis Sadilek (father of her friend Annie), the Bohemian farmer who had brought with him from. Europe a cultivated love of music. Sadilek despaired of the bleak Nebraska existence and took his life in his barn by shooting himself. This bloody tale stayed with Cather. She must have seen it as a graphic and telling representation of the contradictions in the lives of these immigrants, who were looked down upon for their poverty but were lonely for a culture which was, in many cases, richer than their American neighbors'. She remembered it twice, once in the first story she published, Peter (1892), and again, more permanently, as an episode in My Ántonia.

Cather also used in her work less dramatic but equally vivid memories of the prairie. The scarceness of trees had impressed her deeply: Sometimes I went south to visit our German neighbors and to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew out of a deep crack in the earth.... Trees were so rare in that country ... that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons. In My Ántonia, a mature Ántonia proudly shows Jim Burden the trees in her orchard: I love them as if they were people.... There wasn't a tree here when we first came. Cather also remembered her grandmother using a walking stick to frighten rattlesnakes away; Jim Burden's grandmother has a snake-cane. Her own terror of snakes is reflected in some of her books: in O Pioneers!, where John Bergson loses his stallion to a snake bite; in The Song of the Lark, when Thea warns her brothers of rattlesnakes; in The Professor's House, where the story of Henry's death (in two hours) from a rattlesnake is related; and again in My Ántonia, where Jim is repulsed by a giant rattler and violently kills it while Ántonia stands by, first screaming and then crying. Years later, Ántonia's and Cuzak's son Charley asks Jim Burden about the rattler he killed at dog-town.

When Jim Burden in My Ántonia tells of his first year on the Divide, he re-creates Cather's memories. In the introduction, Cather (as Jim Burden's friend) recalls her Red Cloud years poignantly:

We were talking about what it was like to spend one's childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the colour and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and grey as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.

Red Cloud High School whetted Cather's appetite for learning. Two adult friends opened her eyes to the classics. Her love of music was born in her friendship with townswoman Mrs. Minor (Mrs. Harling in My Ántonia). Her affection for languages began with a German-Jewish couple named Wiener. (They come to life as the Rosens in Cather's later Nebraska story Old Mrs. Harris [1932].) Yet it took many years for Cather to appreciate all the prairie had given her. The difficult lives led on the harsh landscape caused her to believe she had not relished life there. After graduating from high school, she was impatient to leave Red Cloud and eager for the learning and culture the University of Nebraska at Lincoln promised her.

Based on her youth in Red Cloud, Cather thought that if she was to accomplish anything she would have to identify closely with the male world. She admired Red Cloud's Dr. McKeeby, who helped her through a serious illness, and so she planned to be a doctor, indeed, signed herself Wm. Cather, M.D. She preferred dressing as a boy, called herself Willie (her family used that name all her life), and signed some of her books Wm. Cather, Jr. Her university classmates would remember the Willa Cather who was masculine, brash, and unconventionally dressed. She was to abandon the tomboy clothes when she entered the world of professional journalism.

Cather spent five years in Lincoln, the first year in preparation for entry into the freshman class because her Red Cloud schooling had been insufficient. At age sixteen and a half she entered the university, where she worked hard and impressed her teachers and friends as a fine student. Early in her college career she abandoned medicine for the study of classics. She had written an extraordinary essay on Thomas Carlyle which her professor had printed, without her knowledge, in the Nebraska State Journal; it was reprinted in the college magazine. Later she wrote, What youthful vanity can be unaffected by the sight of itself in print! From that time on, nothing was more important to her than writing—first reviews and essays, then short stories and poetry, finally novels. The Chicago book critic Fanny Butcher said Cather told her nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.

Cather was a forthright, well-read, and sometimes unhappy student. She resisted learning French grammar but read more of the classic French texts than her instructor. She hated the pedantry and rigidity of her English professor and lost no chance to say so. She ridiculed in print persons in the arts she scorned, and expressed her aesthetic views with a brash certainty unusual for a girl of her age and experience. When, in her junior year, she began to write a column for the Nebraska State Journal, she showed herself to be a harsh critic, unafraid to express cutting opinions, astonishingly sure of herself in her affection for or dislike of plays and concerts. She was accused of criticizing with a meat ax. Years later, a good college friend called her reviews blasts.

At school, Cather formed close friendships with women. The novelist-to-be Dorothy Canfield became a good friend: the two collaborated on a Gothic short story published in the Sombrero, a student publication. Cather was deeply attached to Louise Pound, an upperclassman whose family befriended the brilliant young student. Cather wrote her a series of moving letters and confided her emotional involvement to close friends in Red Cloud. Her friendships with women would remain strong. She never married (indeed, marriage is a very unhappy state in much of her fiction); she created heroines who are larger than life and stronger than the men around them; her male characters seem to me weak and ineffectual in contrast.

Upon graduating in 1895, Cather no doubt wanted to put Nebraska behind her. She spent an unhappy year in Red Cloud and then in 1896 left for Pittsburgh, where she had been offered a job on a new magazine. She was compelled, I believe, by her impatience with life in a small town, by her strong ambition, and by her desire to enter the wider world of art, music, and literature. She spent ten years in Pittsburgh, five as a journalist, sending reports of events in that cultivated city back to the Courier and the Nebraska State Journal. She left journalism for teaching, first at Central High School and later at Allegheny High School.

In 1899, in the dressing room of a well-known actress, she met Isabelle McClung, a young and beautiful Pittsburgh socialite, the daughter of a judge, who was to be the strongest and most enduring influence on her emotional life; their friendship lasted until Isabelle's death in 1938. Cather dedicated The Song of the Lark to Isabelle, and confessed to a friend that everything she had written was for her. In 1901, after living in several boarding houses, Cather moved to the McClungs' luxurious home on fashionable Murray Hill Avenue. There she was provided with a small study on the third floor; there she entered into the artistic life in Pittsburgh. Two years later she published a volume of her own poems, April Twilights, undistinguished but, it may be, a sign to those around her that she was a writer. Later she disparaged the poems, reprinting only a few in her collected works.

Cather had begun to publish some new short stories and to reconsider her views on regional subject matter. One of her early reviews was of a book by the British writer Eden Phillpotts. She wrote that she wished there was an American writer who could write of the American common people, the people on whom the burden of labor rested, who planted the corn and cut the wheat. She could not have foreseen (her attitude toward Nebraska life was still critical and even resentful; see her stories The Sculptor's Funeral and A Wagner Matinée, both published in 1903) that she would become one of the most noted of those writers.

In the summer of 1902, Cather, with Isabelle, went abroad for the first time, beginning a long affection for Europe. She loved the Old World—the past in literature had always interested her—and now she found contact with it invigorating. As a novelist with a passion for the past, Cather produced novels that went further and further back into history, including Shadows on the Rock (1931), which has scenes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. The violinist Yehudi Menuhin, her young friend in later years, wrote in his autobiography: She adored what she felt had not been her birthright—the old, the European, the multilayered, and above all, music. When the young man was worried about his future, she told him: "If we remain always in our land we miss the companionship of seasoned and disciplined minds. Here there are no standards of taste and no responses to art except emotional ones. But she realized that if we adopt Europe altogether, we lose that sense of belonging which is so important, and we lose part of our reality. Young writers living abroad, she said, are just unconscious imposters. The things his own country makes him feel (the earth, the sky, the slang in the streets) are about the best capital a writer has to draw upon." She herself may have been tempted by Europe. Surely she grew to despise American materialism and indifference to culture. But she knew where her roots were: in Nebraska, on the prairie, with her beloved European immigrants.

McClure's, Phillips & Company published the first collection of Cather's stories, The Troll Garden, in 1905. Most of the stories had appeared before in magazines; some were discarded for a later collection, Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920), and were omitted in her collected works. Here are stories of art and artists as well as impressive tales that express the author's critical view of life in a small prairie town (The Sculptor's Funeral) and the harshness and cultural deprivation of life on the prairie (A Wagner Matinée).

The Pittsburgh years were brought to a close in 1906 by the New York publisher and editor'S. S. McClure, who admired Cather's stories and persuaded her to come to New York as an associate editor for his magazine. She stayed with the difficult and demanding McClure for six years, editing hundreds of pieces, rewriting many of them entirely. She took a long leave from her job and, in 1912, resigned. She never regretted her decision to leave teaching, writing to her Pittsburgh students: So I turn to work I love with very real regret that I must leave behind, for the time at least, a work I have come to love almost as well.

New York, the city she came to, perhaps tentatively, became her permanent home; she lived there until her death in 1947. Her first residence in the city was an apartment in Washington Square, which she shared with another journalist, Edith Lewis. Lewis was a copyreader at McClure's and later worked as an editor for Bruce Barton's Everywoman. The two women lived together for forty years—after Washington Square, in an apartment at Washington Place, then for many years on Bank Street, and finally in an apartment on Park Avenue. It is interesting to note that the great Nebraska novels were written from the distant comfort of a New York residence.

During her time as an editor for McClure's, Cather was sent to Boston to do research for a series of articles on the life of Mary Baker Eddy. There she had a crucial meeting with the sixty-year-old Maine short story writer, Sarah Orne Jewett. In the Beacon Hill house of elderly Annie Fields, widow of James Fields, the publisher, Cather talked with the writer whose work The Country of the Pointed Firs she admired. Before she died sixteen months later, Jewett gave Cather advice that effectively changed the direction of her writing. Jewett thought she should abandon journalism if she wished to be a serious novelist. She said in a letter, If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago. She warned Cather, Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world. In another letter she told her younger acquaintance, The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper—whether little or great, it belongs to Literature. Cather was to say in an essay on writing, "One of the few really helpful words I ever heard from an older writer, I had from Sarah Orne Jewett when she said to me: 'Of course, one day you will write about your own country. In the meantime, get all you can. One must know the world so well before one can know the parish.'"

We may consider that Cather had not forgotten Jewett's advice about leaving McClure's when she remained a while longer as managing editor; there she continued to learn about the world. McClure, responding to her discontent, gave his opinion that she should remain a magazine editor because she was good at it, while her chances of being a successful fiction writer were slim. As inducement, he sent her abroad for two months, but by 1911 she knew that Jewett had been right about quitting journalism for fiction-writing.

In the same year her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, was accepted and published by Ferris Greenslet at Houghton Mifflin. It is an interesting, if nonpersuasive, international novel in the manner of Henry James. Greenslet heaped praise upon it and, in a memo to other editors in the house, mentioned that it was

Reviews for O Pioneers!

[sriddell_8 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a beautiful book! It's hard to believe it was written over 100 years ago - it has a very modern sensibility.

The main character Alexandra emigrated from Sweden with her family at a young age. Alexandra's father dies a few years after settling the family on a homestead in Nebraska. As he's dying, the father realizes Alexandra has more business and practical sense than her brothers, so he leaves the farm in her care.

The remaining family has good times and bad times financially. They also experience both joy and tragedies. Throughout the book there's a feeling on not quite fatalism - more of a feeling that everything that happens is just as it should be. Even terrible events.

I love reading a classic like this and discovering why it's considered "classic".

[mykl8s · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I never wanted to be a pioneer, but Cather sure showed me how that sort of life could be appealing to many people.

[mrslee_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

At first glance, this read is a pleasant story; but like the rain, it sinks in and thoughts and understanding begin to grow. This could be the story of many of my ancestors. It could be the story of the independent women who settled the wild land and men. It could be the story of repression endured, of the strength of love, and the agony of failure. So many undercurrents are in this tale, as in life. It was a pleasant story, though it dealt with heartache, failure and depression. It is a love song to the land, and those who love the land.

[write5review · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Grit and Determination on the Plains

Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! encapsulates in one brief novel the epic story of America’s breadbasket, the immigrants who settled and transformed it into the vast productive land we know today, the challenges they confronted and overcame, the importance of and strength they derived from shared heritage and community, and the vision of some to see past their present difficulties to a brighter future. And it features as a prime mover, the one with the greatest vision, a woman of strong will, of inner fortitude, possessing the strength to set aside societal convention as she tamed the wild land as her brothers never could, Alexandra Bergson.

In the 1880s, when the novel opens, Nebraska was still a wild land, given to cattle raising. But the U.S. government wanted to spur agricultural development and to that end passed the Homestead Acts (1882), whereby Americans could receive land free with the proviso they had to live on it and cultivate it within five years. Land was also sold to immigrants who poured into the country, particularly from Scandinavia and Germany. John Bergson, the patriarch in the novel, settled near the fictional town of Hanover. John worked himself to death, literary, farming his land and upon his death left the homestead to Alexandra, going against the grain of both the times and old world tradition. He saw that she, not her brothers Lou and Oscar, had the vision and intelligence to build what he had begun into something big and prosperous. By the second part of the novel, which jumps ahead sixteen years, we see that she has accomplished just that, resisting the brothers’ fears of taking on risk and doing things differently than many around them.

Alexandra, apart from running the farm, leads a lonely life. She has recurring dreams of being carried in the arms of a strong man, but keeps her closest male friend, Carl, at a distance, until the end of the novel. She establishes a close relationship with Marie Tovesky Shabata, whom both she and her youngest brother, Emil, have known since childhood. Emil and Marie are near the same ages and Alexandra encourages Emil to help out on the Shabata farm often. Marie is married to a very difficult man, a man at odds with the world, a man who dislikes his neighbors and is disliked my them in return. Emil, of course, falls in love with Marie, who is vivacious and happy, even, and perhaps in spite, of her marital plight. Her husband, among other things, is jealous of Marie and always suspicious of her. In the end, this leads to tragedy, with him killing both Emil and Marie as they talk to each other in an apple orchard. Interestingly, and a reflection of attitudes toward woman, Alexandra not only blames herself for the murders but also Emil and Marie for engaging in an affair (though emotional not conjugal). In short, Marie bears responsibility for her husbands reaction. As a result, Alexandra visits Frank, the husband, in prison in Lincoln and promises to help him secure an earlier release. This aspect of the novel might have modern readers raising their eyebrows.

In the end, Carl returns from Alaska, where he has gone to stake his claim to adventure and riches, to console her, and the two, though unsaid, marry.

Cather writes with a simplicity that will appeal to most readers. Reminding oneself of American origins, in particular how immigrant groups clung together before blending into the American landscape, is a strength, especially given current times. The portrayal of a strong woman able to succeed to the world of business is another strength. However, some readers may be less accepting of certain ideas more in line with traditional expectations for women, especially as they relate to emotional spousal abuse and finger pointing for a crime of a passion. The Signet Classic mass paperback edition contains a fine introduction by Elizabeth Janeway, and for this reason is the recommended edition.

[lynnb_64 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is my second Willa Cather novel, and will probably be my last. She writes extremely well about places, but her character development leaves something to be desired. In this book, we can see the very different ideas of morality that existed a century ago. Marie and Emil are more at fault than the man who shoots them. Alexandra was, in many ways, an early feminist. But, she still lived for her youngest brother and ended up married. Given that the book was written in 1913, I found these ideas more "interesting" than upsetting...in a "times have changed" kind of way. So, a good story about duty: to the land, to your father and ultimately to yourself.

[bookconcierge · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Cather’s first novel follows one family over decades as they settle the great plains of Nebraska. The heroine is Alexandra Bergson, who comes to the prairie near Hanover, NE, as the only girl in a family of brothers. Yet it is Alexandra who grows up to take over the farm from her father and ensure the family’s prosperity. I loved Alexandra, despite her blind spots. This is a strong woman! Her love of the land is evident, but she is no romantic. Her eyes are wide open to potential disasters, but her shrewd instinct and even handedness in the way she husbands resources and manages both the land and the farm workers help her avoid disaster and recover from set-backs. In addition, Alexandra is also completely dedicated to her family and to helping her younger brother, in particular, achieve his dreams. Her devotion, however, comes with a price, and she foregoes more than one chance at her own personal happiness. And yet, the story encompasses triumph as well as tragedy. Cather’s writing is gloriously descriptive. I can smell the scent of freshly turned earth, hear the animals, feel the dusty grit. Her work evokes in me a kind of nostalgia for a simpler time, and at the same time, great relief that I do not have to perform that hard work today.

[composingcomposer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Alexandra is incredible. She was strong, and suffered at the hands of all of her brothers. The story was beautiful, even in it's sadness. The writing was poetic and kept me reading.

I loved the ending. The scene where Alexandra realizes it was Jesus who she had been dreaming about for much of her life. I loved it. I was still happy when Carl came back and they agreed to get married, but I also liked the idea of Alexandra becoming a nun (it was implied that was what she was considering this.)

The one thing that I didn't like was the victim blaming. Frank Shabata hurt his wife, not physically, but emotionally, for years and years. It was wrong of her and Emil to commit adultry, but two wrongs make more wrong, and I didn't like that first Frank, and then Alexandra essentially blamed Emil and Marie for Frank's murdering them. Besides the fact that this action was a mortal sin for Frank, it also prevented the two of them from repenting their own. Whether he had a temper or not, Frank should not have kept saying that it was her fault for letting him catch them. It was his fault for letting himself become bitter and suspicious. It was his fault for trying to make Marie as bitter as he. It was his fault for taking the gun with him to the orchard when he did not truly think that there were any intruders. And it was his fault for raising the gun to his shoulder and firing. The murder may not have been premeditated, but it was murder none the less. Ivar believes that the Emil and Marie are in Hell for their actions. I don't know whether they are (or whether non-fictional people in their place would be,) but they didn't deserve to die so quickly and without the chance to ask for God's forgiveness.

So, basically I really enjoyed the book, but I didn't like the fact that Marie and Emil were blamed for their own murders. They were to blame for the sins they committed, yes, but not for the sins Frank committed. I do think I will be reading more Willa Cather in the future.

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

O Pioneers by Willa Cather was originally published in 1913 and is written in her trademark spare yet lyrical prose as it explores themes of destiny, chance, love and steadfastness. The setting is that of a farming community in Nebraska which brings a sense of neighbourliness and family ties. Over and above all is the land which these people homesteaded, saw through the lean and difficult years and now are reaping it’s rich benefits. The central character is Alexandra Bergson, the only daughter and oldest child of Swedish immigrants. She holds the family together and to the land when her father passes away unexpectedly. She more than proved herself worthy and made her family one of the most prosperous landowners in the region. Of course there was a price for this success, she gave up any chance of a personal life in order to help the family. Of course, her brothers aren’t always at ease with Alexandra and in later years they try unsuccessfully to control her which causes them to fall out. The tragedy of the story is her youngest brother, Emil, whom Alexandra has basically raised. She wants him to have choices and advantages that the rest of the family didn’t have, but she cannot control his heart which he has given to Marie, a married woman from the town’s French community. Although I haven’t read Willa Cather’s Prairie Trilogy any particular order, O Pioneers is a wonderful addition. Her strong simple characters go about their lives in this descriptive Nebraska setting in a natural manner. There is drama and action but it never feels artificial or forced. I found this to be an excellent read, and it will be one that I remember.

[lkernagh · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I should probably start off this review by admitting that I have not been reading Cather’s Prairie Trilogy in order, having read My Antonia around this time last year. Cather’s strength – IMO anyways – is her wonderfully descriptive prose. She knew how to paint a picture with words! Like My Antonia, Oh Pioneers! gives readers a strong female protagonist, this time in Alexandra Bergson, the eldest child of a Swedish immigrant family who takes over the running of the family farm when the father dies. Like other women in Cather’s stories, Alexandra is an individual with grit and determination, valuable characteristics to have to survive and thrive in the American frontier of the early nineteenth century. Alexandra faces family struggles as her younger brothers side with societal views of the time period and feel that it is inappropriate for Alexandra to be free to do as she pleases, so very much a story about a woman claiming her rights outside of the bounds of traditional social norms of the time period. While a short novel – more a novella – the story only hits a couple of stutters/lurches to the otherwise even flow of the story. A common theme I have found in the Cather stories I have read so far is her ability to communicate to the reader the spiritual connection of land and people. Her characters are grounded, driven with a purpose and not flighty as one might find in some other novels. For me, the high points of this story are the strong female protagonist, the mosaic of immigrant characters from the “old country” that would have populated the American frontier of the time period and Cather’s wonderful, descriptive prose, written in plain, accessible language.

[bell7_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When her father dies, Alexandra takes over the running of the farm in Nebraska. Over the years and told in a series of vignettes, we get to see Alexandra's successes and challenges, and get to know the community of pioneer and immigrant folk who work hard and love the land.My first impression of the book was that the land itself was the most interesting character, and that feeling never quite abandoned me though I was impressed with how much Cather was able to convey about the community in a series of short vignettes that cover a few decades. Did I enjoy the book? It's hard to say. I admired Cather's writing to some extent. I liked some characters and the fact that it was about a woman running a farm. I was disappointed by the side story of Marie and Alexandra's brother Emil. They love each other but of course their love is ill-fated and Marie's jealous husband, Frank, kills them in a fit of passion. It was presented as almost inevitable but it made me mad. The descriptions were sometimes quite lovely. Yet it didn't completely grip me, and I most likely would not read it again.

[larryerick · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I always had in the back of mind while I was reading this book that it had been written in a much more conservative time. I suspect that it pushed the limits more back then than it feels to be doing now, especially in regard to women's rights. I was struck by how undated the writing was, not stiff in any way, but not exactly free-spirited either. At times, the narrative is quite eloquent, but it had too many wordy, bland passages for me to forgive its variable quality. For the most part, I chock that up to this being an early work for a gifted writer. I expect to enjoy My Antonia even more.

[melissalenhardt · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Uncharacteristically, I managed to read more than half of this novel without reading the back of book blurb. When I did and saw the word "murder" I laughed. How could such a quiet, deliberate book lead to such a harsh, unforgiving word? Masterfully, it turns out.

Cather's strength is description. Her descriptions of nature are especially detailed and evocative. But, she's at her best when she is underplaying events, using a few well chosen words to pinpoint emotions. Beautiful and surprising, O Pioneers! will stay with me for a while.

[katherinegregg · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

O Pioneers is the story of Alexandra Bergsons, the daughter of Swedish immigrants who settle in Nebraska at the turn of the century. Farming life is hard work and when Alexandra’s father passes away, she is left in charge of the household and the land. Alexandra works hard to turn the farm into a successful business and put Emil, her youngest brother through college. As a result, Alexandra sacrifices her social life and finds herself alone. Many years later, Alexandra is reunited with Carl, a childhood friend who comes back to Nebraska from the big city to visit. Having achieved success, Alexandra finds that she yearns to share her life with Carl. Carl has always been in love with Alaexandra but feels he must go to Alaska to seek his fortune before asking for Alexandra’s hand. Alexandra waits patiently for his return. In the meantime, Emil has returned from a year in Mexico and finds himself still hopelessly in love with Marie, a childhood friend who is now married. News of a tragic event cause Carl to return to Nebraska where he is reunited with Alexandra, this time for good.

[dandelionroots · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

At the turn of the last century, Alexandra, a first generation Swedish immigrant, shoulders the responsibility of managing a farm in the vast erasure of flat land and endless sky that is Nebraska and raising her three brothers after the untimely death of their parents. She sees and capitalizes upon the potential of the land where others find despair. Frontierswomen are my favorite."Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before."

[browner56 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

O Pioneers! tells the story of Alexandra Bergson, a first-generation immigrant to whom falls the arduous task of managing her family’s farm in turn-of-the-last-century Nebraska. After her parents die prematurely, Alexandra is left in charge of her three brothers—one still a young child—who prove to be little help in running the day-to-day operations of the business. Nevertheless, she manages to find great joy in the simple things she finds around her, such as relationships with long-time friends, planning for her youngest brother to “escape” the hardscrabble life and go to college, or the wild beauty of the rugged land where she lives. However, as skillful and fortunate as she is at farming, her personal life leaves a lot to be desired. Still, Alexandra never loses her fundamental romantic view of the world.As the first novel of Willa Cather’s celebrated Prairie Trilogy, this slender volume does a wonderful job of capturing the struggles, heartbreaks, and occasional joys of daily life in that often bleak, inhospitable time and place. In Alexandra, the author has created one of the great heroines in literature: a strong, smart, and resourceful person who perseveres against some very long odds. In spare but evocative language, Cather paints a compelling portrait of a woman whose vision and commitment are realized, but at a considerable personal cost. The novel is also a loving portrait of the land itself; the descriptions of the remote country as it evolves through the seasons and over the years were simply beautiful. This book was a joy from start to finish and it deserves to remain a treasured classic by each new generation of readers.

[lorisbook · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Life on the divide is tough. We know this as it is written, " The records of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches of time left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human strivings.John Bergson is dying and he tells his daughter Alexandra he wants her to run the farm when he is gone. She has 3 brothers Emil, Lou and Oscar but everyone knows that it is Alexandra who expresses herself best in soil. John passes on and the family farm prospers for three years after his death but then hard times come. Families around them are selling out and leaving the divide but Alexandra goes down south to look at land and she comes back and talks her brothers into mortgaging the farm so they can buy up more land. Sixteen years after Johns death his wife dies. The farms are now prosperous so the inheritance is divided among the 4 children. Sadly, the coveting expressed in childhood extends into adulthood and ends in tragedy. And, the story comes full circle as Carl is there at the end to help Alexandra, just as he was in the beginning.

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An engrossing story to lose yourself in, well read.

[benuathanasia · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A character piece. What happens in this book isn't particularly interesting, but the people it centers around is. There isn't anything particularly mesmerizing about any of the characters - they're just so real and wholesome and pleasant that I'd like being friends with them, but they have conflict just enough that they're intriguing to watch from afar as well. I love Alexandra most, of course. A feminist icon.

[lycomayflower · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Meh, Cather. I read My Antonia sometime in my teens and didn't care for it. Read O! Pioneers in masters degree school and didn't care for it. And I still don't care for it. The descriptions of the land are pretty amazing, and I like some of the characters okay, but for the most part I'm just not gripped or intrigued or fascinated or angered or annoyed or anything really until the end, when Frank shoots his wife, Marie, and Emil and Alexandra is all "well, you know, it's more their fault than yours, Frank, because, you know, carrying on and doing the what-not." Aside from my general "sorry, can't" re: "it's okay to murder your wife and her lover because adultery," Alexandra's reaction to it given her otherwise quite (proto-) feminist attitudes about everything else make me all verhoodled in my brainmeats. This is one of those books I feel is far more important to literature than it ever will be entertaining, enlightening, or appealing to me.

[romonko · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book was written in 1913, but it is set in 19th century Nebraska. At that time, a large number of immigrants had made their way to the United States and they came because they knew that land was being offered for free to settlers. This particular settlement is Hanover, Nebraska, and the book is about the Bergstrom family who were immigrants from Sweden. Hard work is definitely not foreign to these people and Alexandra and her family (mother, father, three brothers, and Alexandra herself), Alexandra's father is taken from the family at a fairly young age, but he leaves a sizeable homestead and a house for his family, and he entrusts his daughter to look after it all. He recognizes that she is the most capable of the lot. Alexandra faces this challenge head-on, and she increases her landholdings, and ensures that her family are much better off than when she began. She does this at great sacrifice to her own personal life. This is a story about the strength of the human race; about love and loss; and about great tragedy. It's a wonderful and realistic portrayal of colonial life in the untamed American prairie. I highly recommend this book.

[scerakor-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I feel obligated to say that it wasn't by any means due to the writing, references, or classic applicability of this book that it got a two star rating (I'm calling it a 2.5). It is simply because, although interesting, it was hard pressed to keep my attention for long periods of time. I would still recommend it if you are interested in early colonial mid-west historical fiction!

[nx74defiant · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The story of a strong female pioneer. It must have really hurt to have her brothers dismiss her contribution because she was a women.

[marsap_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

O Pioneers, the first of the Great Plains Trilogy by Willa Cather, tells the story the Bergsons, a Swedish family who immigrates to the plains of Nebraska at the turn of the 20th century. The main character is Alexandra Bergson who begins the novel as a young girl and the novel ends with her as a middle age woman. Alexandra eventually inherits the family farmland when her father dies and devotes her life to making the farm a viable enterprise at a time when other immigrant families are giving up and leaving the prairie. The novel is also concerned with two romantic relationships, one between Alexandra and family friend Carl Linstrum and the other between Alexandra's brother Emil and the married Marie Shabata. The novel really feels like a series of short stories about these immigrants and the land of Nebraska. As with many of Cather’s novels the writing is beautiful—she makes you feel like you are standing on that prairie. Though not my favorite Cather novel (that would be Death comes for the Archbishop) I did enjoy the novel. 4 out of 5 stars.

[daniel5estes · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Beautifully written and elegantly paced. Willa Cather's talent for description and dialogue make it clear why her fans adore her. Personally, I liked Death Comes for the Archbishop more, though I haven't yet read My Antonia.

[beyondedenrock · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Coming back to read this book for a second time reminded me that when I first read Willa Cather – many years ago – she took me to a time and place I had known nothing about and she made me realise that there were more sides to classic writing than I had realised.Before I read her books the only American woman author I knew was Louisa May Alcott ….Enthused by my new discovery I read every single book I could find in a short space of time, not really stopping to think about the arc of her storytelling life or how one book related to another.Now that I have come back to her work, reading all of her books in chronological order and thinking about them a little more along the way, I can say that though she hadn’t reached the peak of her powers when she wrote this, her second book, it is a wonderful work and a very fine demonstration of what she could do.Her writing is sparse and yet it says so much so clearly. It speaks profoundly of the consequences of travelling to a new life in America, of the harsh realities of pioneer life, and of particular lives lived.Alexandra Bergson travelled from Sweden to Nebraska as a child with her parents and siblings. Her father knew little about farming, he was ill-equipped for the new life he had chosen, but was intelligent, he saw so many possibilities, and he was prepared to work hard to make a better future for his family.Lou and Oscar, his first two sons, had no interest in farm work and could see no potential in the land. Alexandra could, she saw the same things, she had the same love for the land as her father. He appreciated that, and when he died he left her a controlling interest in the family estate. Her brother were appalled when she invested in more and more land as other farmers gave it up to return to the city or to safer, more fertile country.She had faith in its future.Her faith was justified.Twenty years later Alexandra was the mistress of a prosperous and unencumbered empire, and head of her own household. She loved being part of the pioneer community and that community had loved and respected her; she appreciated the old ways, and she was always ready to give her time and to take trouble for her friends and neighbours.Lou and Oscar were both married and established in new lives, enjoying the fruits of the family success without really appreciating what their sister had done. It was her younger brother, Emil, who was the apple of Alexandra’s eye, her hope for the future, and she was so pleased that she was able to send him to university.She loved the land, but she understood that the life she had chosen might not be the life that her brother would want.Alexandra was a strong, practical and intelligent woman who had a wonderful understanding of her world and who cared deeply for the people whose lives touched hers. She loved her life but there were times when she was lonely, when she wished that she had a husband and family of her own, and when she even wondered if the struggles she had made to tame the land that she loved had been worthwhile.She was still close to Carl Linstrom, the best friend of her childhood, but his family had been one of those that gave up the pioneering life and returned to the city, and that had taken Carl into a very different world. He understood Alexandra better than anyone else though, and was his support Alexandra the courage to face the future after something devastating happened.It happened because though there was much that was stable and certain in Alexandra’s world, but not everything. Her younger friend, Marie, who was young and bright, who had such hopes and dream, realised that her impulsive marriage had been a mistake and that she would have to live with the consequences. When Emil came home he had changed, and his own hopes and dreams were something that he could never share with his sister.The telling of this story is utterly so. Willa Cather painted her characters and their world so beautifully and with such depth that it became utterly real. Everything in this book lived and breathed. Every emotion, every nuance was right. I lived this story with Alexandra, Emil, Marie, and their friends and neighbours.I can’t judge them or evaluate them, because I feel too close to them. I’m still thinking of them not as characters but as people I have come to know well and have many, complex feelings about.The story is beautifully balanced, with many moments of happiness – and even humour – coming from successes, from the observance of old traditions, and simply from the joy of being alive in the world.It’s a simple story with a very conventional narrative. In some ways it’s a little simplistic, but it’s very well told.Willa Cather had still to grow as a writer.And yet it feels completely right ….

[ladycato · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have read excerpts of this book over the years, and it was wonderful to read the full book at last. It's a short read (my copy was a little over 200 pages) and it reads fast as well--much more so than many other novels of the period. Cather is a master of lyrical reason. For that alone, she should be studied and modeled by writers, but her story construction is likewise fascinating. Cather's characters are well-rounded and evocative and utterly relatable. She does follow some conventions of the time, such as tragic, transformative deaths of major characters, but O Pioneers! is actually more positive than other period books in this regard. This is in keeping with the nature of the book's heroine, Alexandra, who is a strong, assertive woman in a male-dominated world. I was bothered by some of Alexandra's actions at the end, but I'm also aware that her reactions were in keeping with a woman of faith in her time.

[mamashepp · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Cather was simply brilliant at painting a picture of Nebraska as the country became tamed and the people that tamed it.

[japaul22 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved this book that invokes the pioneer spirit of the American midwest. It has a fantastic lead woman, Alexandra Bergson. In the first section of the book, Alexandra's father dies and he leaves the family farm to his capable daughter instead of his sons. To their credit, they see the reason for this and the strength of Alexandra and follow her lead on how to run the farm with great success. As they succeed in farming the land, though, their personal lives begin to suffer. The book delves in to the family dynamics and also the community. Alexandra also has to decide if her farming success is enough for her to feel she's led a full life. The best part of this book is how it describes the setting. The Nebraska plains come to life with Cather's beautiful writing. She also describes the various immigrant groups settling the plains with humor and insight. I loved it.

[gingermama-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book was a pleasant surprise -- I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did. Written 100 years ago, its observations of human foibles are still apt.

[richardderus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rating: 3.75* of fiveThe Publisher Says: Set on the Nebraska prairie where Willa Cather (1873–1947) grew up, this powerful early novel tells the story of the young Alexandra Bergson, whose dying father leaves her in charge of the family and of the lands they have struggled to farm. In Alexandra's long flight to survive and succeed, O Pioneers! relates an important chapter in the history of the American frontier.Evoking the harsh grandeur of the prairie, this landmark of American fiction unfurls a saga of love, greed, murder, failed dreams, and hard-won triumph. In the fateful interaction of her characters, Willa Cather compares with keen insight the experiences of Swedish, French, and Bohemian immigrants in the United States. And in her absorbing narrative, she displays the virtuoso storytelling skills that have made her one of the most admired masters of the American novel. My Review: Simple, unadorned prose gets very wearing when it's also missing some basic character-building. In 122pp, it's not possible to do a Proustian job of lovingly explaining why people are who they are. But [The Picture of Dorian Gray], also a shortie, has the most gorgeously subtle character-building; [Mrs. Dalloway] is another example; so one concludes that Cather just wasn't interested in Lou or Oscar or the French neighbors.As a moment in time, the book is invaluable. A concise slice of the life led by the crazy dreamers who decided the Old Country was no longer enough for them and their kids, packed what they could afford to carry, and vamoosed for the New World.There is a private society that's trying to get together a colony of people with all the talents necessary to keep themselves alive on Mars. It's a one-way ticket...just like the pioneers of old.How I wish I was young and healthy. I'd be on that rocket in a heartbeat.