O Pioneers!
Willa Cather established her reputation as a writer of extraordinary talent with the publication of O Pioneers!-the first of her books set in Nebraska. In this stirring romance of the Western prairies, the lives of two very different heroines unfold during a time when the wild lands of the frontier broke the spirit of many of America's hopeful Swedish, Czech, Bohemian, and French immigrant farmers. When Alexandra Bergson inherits the family farm as a young girl, she reveals herself to be as uncommonly determined, enterprising, and capable as she is charismatic. Meanwhile, the relationship between Alexandra's brother Emil and the beautiful Marie Shabata plays out in what many critics view as some of Cather's finest writing. Throughout, the land itself emerges as a character that challenges and changes the lives it supports. Cather's descriptions of the territory and its people evoke a time and place long gone but foundational in forming our national character. This Warbler Classics edition includes key reviews of the first edition and a biographical timeline.
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Community Reviews
I had a hard time getting into this novel until about the halfway point, but fortunately it's a short book. The writing is beautiful and the character of Alexandra is inspiring. I'm not sure how I made it through high school and college without reading a Willa Cather book, but I'm glad I can finally mark that off my list.
Having tried and failed to read My Antonia a couple of times, I didn’t expect to like this book a lot. So I was shocked when I started to love it. Cather's prose is tight, and her characters are gracefully drawn. Even an eccentric like Ivar doesn’t get the Faulkner treatment; these people appear in strokes, gradually, and they are all the more real for it. I was enraptured by this book, almost all the way to the end. [It does really start to unravel in the final exchange between Alexandra and Carl—I don’t know what that was in the service of, exactly.]
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Having re-read it, I was more bothered this time by the way Cather pretends the land was uninhabited before these European pioneers arrived. Several times she speaks of the land as though they were the first human beings to tread upon it.
In the end, I was still captivated by the story and characters, but I do have to dock it a star for the historical erasure that underlies so much of the book’s philosophical musing. It made it more difficult & less comfortable to read, certainly.
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Having re-read it, I was more bothered this time by the way Cather pretends the land was uninhabited before these European pioneers arrived. Several times she speaks of the land as though they were the first human beings to tread upon it.
In the end, I was still captivated by the story and characters, but I do have to dock it a star for the historical erasure that underlies so much of the book’s philosophical musing. It made it more difficult & less comfortable to read, certainly.
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