O Pioneers! (Vintage Classics)
"This early novel is now held to be a very critical and pivotal one in the whole development of the novelist, and this new edition provides . . . a fine printing for readers".-Choice. "A definitive edition of Cather's second novel . . . [that] sets a high standard of quality. . . . David Stouck's comprehensive and cogent historical essay . . . captures not only the life of Cather's text but also provides insight into Cather's imagination and artistic process".-Western American Literature. This is the definitive text of O Pioneers! that appeared in the clothbound Willa Cather Scholarly Edition published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1992. Adhering to the standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association, the editors have been faithful in every detail to Cather's intentions as she prepared the manuscript for the first 1913 edition. Printer's errors, spelling of some foreign names, and inconsistencies in dialect and certain stylistic matters, as well as Cather's later corrections, have all been addressed and corrected. Cather's novel of life on the Nebraska frontier was a critical and popular success (over forty printings) and still speaks to readers today. Susan Rosowski and Charles Mignon are professors of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Kathleen Danker is an assistant professor of English at South Dakota State University. David Stouck is a professor of English at Simon Fraser University.
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Community Reviews
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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