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O Pioneers! (Great Plains trilogy #1)

3.78 of 5 stars 3.78 · rating details · 16,140 ratings · 1,175 reviews

One of America’s greatest women writers, Willa Cather established her talent and her reputation with this extraordinary novel—the first of her books set on the Nebraska frontier. A tale of the prairie land encountered by America’s Swedish, Czech, Bohemian, and French immigrants, as well as a story of how the land challenged them, changed them, and, in some cases, defeated...more

Paperback, 176 pages

Published December 1st 1992 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (first published 1913)

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Jun 16, 2010 Sparrow rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: everyone

Recommended to Sparrow by: sadly, I think no one did

Shelves: favorites, classic-or-cannonical, romantic, reviewed, under-read-gems, girls-rule

Alexandra looked at him mournfully. “I try to be more liberal about such things than I used to be. I try to realize that we are not all made alike.”

Everything in O Pioneers! is beauty to me. I am so in love with this book. Maybe it is because I have it in my brain that pioneers by definition suck that Willa Cather always catches me by surprise and turns me upside down. It’s like walking through an alien landscape and then running into my best friend. I thought what I would find was Michael Lando...more Alexandra looked at him mournfully. “I try to be more liberal about such things than I used to be. I try to realize that we are not all made alike.”

Everything in O Pioneers! is beauty to me. I am so in love with this book. Maybe it is because I have it in my brain that pioneers by definition suck that Willa Cather always catches me by surprise and turns me upside down. It’s like walking through an alien landscape and then running into my best friend. I thought what I would find was Michael Landon crying into a butter churn, and here you are, everything that is wonderful about humans. Still, I never know whether to recommend that other people read this book, or whether it is better to just keep it to myself. As Alexandra says, we are not all made alike, and maybe what is beauty and revelation to me is Michael Landon crying into a butter churn to you.

It’s so easy to say why I hate writing and difficult to say why I love it. I want to compare Cather to Hemingway because of how steady and careful their writing is, because of how speculation about their lives cheapens conversations about their stories, but no. I want to say Cather writes what is in my soul, but that’s not right either. What she writes is as much her own world as it is my reality, but that doesn’t make her wisdom easy or her power arrogant. She is not looking for my approval, but she is looking outside herself for some kind of truth.

At a particularly conflicted time in my life, I went to a club with some friends and I saw a girl dancing like I have never seen anyone dance in my life. She had cleared out as space for herself to the side of the stage, and it was like every part of her body was electric. It was not only beautiful, it was also full of life. Where I didn’t know which way to turn, this girl was in the Place, doing the Thing. Reading O Pioneers! is like watching that girl. Everything is alive in this book.

But, again, I’m struck by the feeling that it may not be alive to you as it is to me. I’ll give you a few descriptions as objectively as I can, and you can judge for yourself. It is about contrasts: country and city, speed and slowness, youth and age, passion and steadiness, inspiration and hard work, deprivation and entitlement. It is operatic. It is kooky at times and kind, but not funny. It is understated and even-handed. It is written by a woman. It is about women and men, who are all sometimes as passionate as people are, and other times as wise as people should be. It is specific, but not petty. There are awkward parts (specifically book 2, chapter 9, though I even think that scene is beautiful).

It’s difficult to talk about this book without spoiling it, and I think a spoiler would really spoil the story. So, I’ll just say one last thing that I hope won’t be a spoiler, but might, so be warned. People get angry with authors who won’t let their characters die and see it as a sign of accomplished writing to kill a character. I think, because of that, I see a lot of bad storytelling mistaken for good storytelling if the author tortures or kills the characters. I really hate when people think character abuse is maturity. At the same time, though, I think there is something right about trusting an author more if the author allows unhappiness into the story. Authors are writing to an audience, and I think they should be writing to entertain, so there is value to me in making stories better than life. At the same time, there is truth in sadness, and if a writer can’t look at sadness, she has sacrificed truth to entertainment. Cather balances truth and entertainment in a way that is completely devastating. She loves her characters, and lets every one of them grow as humans grow, with human joys and human tragedies. It is painful and beautiful to watch.

I almost want to read this book again right away, but too much wisdom in one month can’t be good for my health. I’ll take a little break first and watch some reality TV to balance out my wisdom intake. Just, you know, for my health.(less)

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Mar 10, 2013 Scott Axsom rated it 5 of 5 stars

Willa Cather is a genius. There, I said it. It’s out of the way. “O Pioneers!” was published in 1913 and I’m convinced, had it been published just a few years later, she would’ve won the Pulitzer for it. Sadly, the prize had yet to be established when “O Pioneers!” was published. (It was established for fiction 5 years later, and she received it, anyway, in 1922 for “One of Ours”).

Many factors go into making Cather such a brilliant writer but foremost, in my mind, is her ability to effortlessly...more Willa Cather is a genius. There, I said it. It’s out of the way. “O Pioneers!” was published in 1913 and I’m convinced, had it been published just a few years later, she would’ve won the Pulitzer for it. Sadly, the prize had yet to be established when “O Pioneers!” was published. (It was established for fiction 5 years later, and she received it, anyway, in 1922 for “One of Ours”).

Many factors go into making Cather such a brilliant writer but foremost, in my mind, is her ability to effortlessly describe the essence (or the soul, if you prefer) of a character. “O Pioneers!” is the first in her trilogy devoted to life on the American Plains at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the book starts off on the dusty street of a one-horse prairie town describing the chance encounter of a young girl and a crusty plains traveler. The encounter, though perfectly innocent, ends embarrassingly for the traveler and he retreats to the bar to lick his wounds:

”When a drummer had been knocking about in little drab towns and crawling across the wintry country in dirty smoking cars, was he to be blamed if, when he chanced upon a fine human creature, he suddenly wished himself more of a man?”

Such is Cather’s ability to sum up the character of a man in a brief lament. As many have noted before, her descriptions of the wilderness are both heart-rending and elegiac, setting a kind of melancholy exploration of nature’s then-changing riches. But her descriptions do a great deal more than stir the reader’s spirit throughout “O Pioneers!”, they also serve to describe the motion of the plot and the relational dynamics both between the characters themselves, and between the characters and the land, in a beautiful, dreamy, ongoing feast for the senses.

A young man journeys to see the love of his life;

”Everywhere the grain stood ripe and the hot afternoon was full of the smell of ripe wheat, like the smell of bread baking in an oven. The breath of the wheat and the sweet clover passed him like pleasant things in a dream. He could feel nothing but the sense of diminishing distance. It seemed to him that his mare was flying, or running on wheels, like a railway train. The sunlight, flashing on the window-glass of the big red barns, drove him wild with joy. He was like an arrow shot from the bow. His life poured itself out along the road before him as he rode…”

In “O Pioneers!" Willa Cather establishes her place among the literary greats - male or female, let’s discard that distinction forever, shall we? Her prose not only transported me to the place about which she writes so movingly, it also placed me square in the heart of each of her characters as they wrestled with life’s eternal questions of allegiance and honor (to family and self), attempted to decipher love in all its glorious, imperfect permutations, and struggled to understand fate – simple, immutable fate. And, as she led me to understand the human potential for redemption and forgiveness, I remembered that those elements reside within me - they're universal. The great writers always seem to bring that home and Cather does so in spectacular fashion, in "O Pioneers!".

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Nov 05, 2007 Sarah rated it 4 of 5 stars

I don’t know how, but I got through all of high school and college in America without reading a word of Willa Cather. It all worked out for the best though, since ten years ago I would have probably found her work like, totally boring and about farming and the human condition, or whatever.

I picked up My Antonia a few months ago and loved it to bits - to me, nothing beats stories written in ordinary language about ordinary people. Mix in some bleak, sweeping plains, some overtly lesbian action, a...more I don’t know how, but I got through all of high school and college in America without reading a word of Willa Cather. It all worked out for the best though, since ten years ago I would have probably found her work like, totally boring and about farming and the human condition, or whatever.

I picked up My Antonia a few months ago and loved it to bits - to me, nothing beats stories written in ordinary language about ordinary people. Mix in some bleak, sweeping plains, some overtly lesbian action, and, yes, some awesome stuff about the human condition, and I’m happy.

O Pioneers! was written five years after My Antonia and you can pretty much tell. The story, while similar, is a bit more fantastic and formulaic - Cather studied a lot of Henry James early in her life, and you can tell. Everything is a little simpler and more straightforward in this book — the themes are more concrete, the storyline moves forward steadily, and the ending is clear-cut.

Still, though, there is some beautiful, wonderful stuff happening. The flat, blank unrelenting landscape makes for a great setting in that the characters are very much on their own - affected only by the weather and by each other. There’s not much out in Nebraska during this time period besides sod and humanity, and Cather knows how to write about both.

It’s one of those books where you want to underline things, all the time, like this: “There are only two or three human stories and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country that have been singing the save five notes over for thousands of years. The young people, they live so hard. And yet I sometimes envy them.” Or this, on the very next page, about problem with being free: “Freedom so often means one isn’t needed anywhere.”

And throughout so much of the book, I couldn’t help reeling at how ahead of her time Cather seemed: about women, about education, about religion. And, although it can never be confirmed, since she destroyed all of her personal papers before her death, it seems that Cather was one of the first authors to write about gay rights (but do we really need solid proof? Check out her author photo, for goodness sakes!). For example, in O Pioneers! the moral center of the book is an old man named Ivar. Ivar, whose love and understanding of animals makes him integral to the community, is also mostly mad due to a vague temptation of the body that is never named. He always walks barefoot to punish his body for what he is feeling and constantly reads the Bible for comfort - he has sacrificed his freedom to love in order to reach eternal paradise when he dies.

The book, ultimately, is about the constraints of freedom — being constrained in some respects in order to be free in others - and how getting older means choosing which freedoms you can live with best. Too bad I never got the chance to write a five-page high school essay on this.

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Jul 19, 2012 Diane rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, classics, midwest

"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman."

I don't know why I haven't read this before -- it seems like the kind of novel I should have been assigned in 9th grade -- but I'm glad I read it as an adult because I wouldn't have appreciated it as much when I was younger. I am from the Midwest and my grandparents were farmers, and I loved Willa Cather's stories about what it was like for the pioneers in Nebraska. I liked Cather's spare writing style; she gives just the rig...more

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Oct 25, 2007 Jennifer rated it 4 of 5 stars

o, that little-known genre of prairie tragedy! how we love thee!

you know how you're supposed to read classics, and you slog through them, bored out of your miiiiind, but glad you're taking your literary equivalent of cod liver oil? this book ain't like that. it's actually interesting, in that distant "old classic book" sort of way. if you're into what it was like around these plains when the plows were first hitting the shares, it's short and sweet and good for you.

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Jan 20, 2013 Kiersten rated it 5 of 5 stars

She is the most beautiful writer. I loved this book.

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May 26, 2008 Brian rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: anyone interested in American literature and American history

This book really is a classic and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I think the book has some flaws (e.g., I found the dialogue to often be stilted), but I still think it is a excellent example of a great American novel. It wa written in the year 1913, before the world and even America loss some of its innocence with the advent of the Great War.

I have not read any of the literary criticism of this book or Willa Cather, but from what I know about U.S. history about America at this time, this book had to b...more

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Apr 08, 2008 Rebecca rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is another book I somehow neglected to read during high school and college. High school is excusable, as the school I attended had a joke of an English curriculum. But I'm rather surprised that I never had to read this in any of my American Literature classes at UWM.

I was hooked after reading the poem that precedes Part I, (The Wild Land). She combines lyricism and spareness of prose in a way that I've always admired. My friend Kate told me that F. Scott Fitzgerald was actually so concerned...more

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Jul 03, 2008 Steven rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves (27)," Willa Cather writes in her most famous novel, and with it, proves herself to be a pioneer of American literature. This is a must-read for anyone interested in an astute take on the westward expansion of our nation, told from the point-of-view of the female immigrants who had the vision to see what this country could become. It also charts with emotional precision the issues surr...more

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Jan 10, 2008 snackywombat (v.m.) rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: pioneers of all kinds

Recommended to snackywombat by: my aunt liz

From a set of clippings about Willa Cather that my grandmother saved, I found out that even though Cather was so deeply rooted in Nebraska, she was actually buried in Jaffrey, N.H., where she wanted to be laid facing Mt. Monadnock. This goes a long way in showing how connected Cather felt to land in general, a characteristic of her personality that emerges in so much of her writing. I remember in my teenage impatience, I skipped through a lot of the descriptions of the Nebraska land when I read...more From a set of clippings about Willa Cather that my grandmother saved, I found out that even though Cather was so deeply rooted in Nebraska, she was actually buried in Jaffrey, N.H., where she wanted to be laid facing Mt. Monadnock. This goes a long way in showing how connected Cather felt to land in general, a characteristic of her personality that emerges in so much of her writing. I remember in my teenage impatience, I skipped through a lot of the descriptions of the Nebraska land when I read "My Antonia," but with a more practiced eye, this time I enjoyed them.

Perhaps it was because the main character, Alexandra Bergson, stakes her entire life on the land, that the farmland and prairie almost become another character. Instead of marrying and having children, Alexandra's family is the land and the various misfits that she takes in is her family. But the precariously independent position that she assumes causes the reader to feel even more acutely every loss she endures. Because she has asked for so little for herself, the sympathetic reader wants even more for her.

Like the Midwestern prairie that Cather writes about, its pioneers are hard to people to know, which makes for difficult character development. Even stoic Alexandra at times is inaccessible and the chapters alloted the lovely Marie Tovesky and golden boy Emil Bergson feel perfunctory. Even so, it doesn't take away from the final, heartbreaking denouement since enough time was spent on the two to understand the profundity of the outcome--Alexandra loses her baby brother and her best friend in one fell swoop.

In so many ways, Alexandra represents a community. She is the figurehead for the pioneers that weathered the hardest of times and never gave up. She symbolizes the stoicism and endurance of a people that defined themselves by the land out of which they made themselves. Her blighted success speaks of the the hard fact that no matter how much security and money they built up, they were still not immune to life's saddest events. In a joyous way, this book is one of the earliest feminist writings in American literature and can be appreciated for the effect that it probably had coming out in 1913. (less)

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Jul 31, 2012 Ben Winch rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: anglo, american

I came to this book without preconceptions (in Australia, Willa Cather is not as central to the canon as in the U.S.) and loved it. The prose - for its time and for all time - is crisp, clear, concise and beautiful. The sense of place is haunting. The characters are the type you miss when the story's over. One small criticism: it seemed, perhaps, too tragic, as though its tragedy was the trope of a young writer wanting something to hang a novel on and not intrinsic, deeply-felt, inevitable. Me,...more

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Apr 20, 2012 Mij Woodward rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: hist-fiction

I was hooked with the first sentence of this book: ". . .the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away." This gave me a clue I was dealing with someone who could write.

After that, there were the descriptions of the various immigrant groups that populated the place where the main character, Alexandra, lived. My history-loving side was fed and satisfied throughout.

Part of me sometimes felt critical of some things. Sometimes the dialogue felt li...more

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Dec 17, 2007 Tia rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: classics

How on earth did I get to be 36 without reading a word of Willa Cather? I really fell in love with this book. I love the way she talks about the land, as if it were a character in the book. It was so interesting how all of the different immigrant groups interacted, yet relied so heavily on each other, particularly in hard times. I found Alexandra to be a powerful force as a woman in a time when women were rarely seen in the role that she had. I agree that women of that time shaped our nation thr...more

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Nov 28, 2007 Brandon rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Laura Ingalls Wilder

Shelves: librivox

damn, i wanted to like this, because willa cather might be the best name for a writer, and it could be that this is the way people love (full disclosure: i lived for a time in this part of the country, nebraska/kansas, and an unrequited love of mine shares a last name with one of the characters BUT I WILL SURVIVE STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT! ahem), EXCEPT FOR THE PART WHERE THE TOKEN LOVEBIRDS GET BLASTED WITH A SHOTGUN.

seriously, that was out of nowhere, and upset the pastoral dynamic and was...more

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Nov 29, 2008 Jennifer rated it 5 of 5 stars

Originally published in 1913. A great classic that should be on high school designated reading lists. The story of Swedish, Norwegian and Bohemian immigrant pioneers that settled the Nebraska plains.

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Jan 27, 2008 Christopher rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed

I love Willa Cather, but I found O Pioneers! is a bit melodramatic and calculated -- too earnest and sentimental, and the characters rather one-dimensional compared to her other novels and stories.

The hot spots in Cather: when the sophisticated (effete) urban man returns to confront the (butch) woman of the earth. I like thinking about how the Nebraska-born, Greenwich-Village-living Cather would identified and disidentified with these characters. Why does the intellectual/dandy come to harm?

But...more

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Sep 25, 2007 Hillary rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: romantics

Why should romantics read this book? Because it might slap a little sense into them. Of all the Cather I've read, this is her book that's most in love with the land, while recognizing that it is not anthropomorphic, or even like an animal. The land does not love you back. It's much bigger than you are, sort of like God, only, of course, minus the love thing. This doesn't mean you shouldn't invest yourself in it. It only means that you may not get anything back. Which is, again, a fairly religiou...more

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Aug 16, 2007 Catie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

My mother is a high school English teacher, so my halcyon days of youth were filled with such classics as "The Awakening" and "Madame Bovary" instead of "trash" (my mother's term) such as Sweet Valley High. These novels served their purpose though, particularly Cather's. Such strong female protagonists, and a sweeping mix of history, adventure, and romance--she always makes me long to be a bare-footed hearty Bohemian lass with dark, burning eyes, toiling away in the fields and plains. One of my...more

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Feb 13, 2009 Ellen rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book just reinforced for me how much I love Willa Cather. I read it when I was homesick for the prairies of the Midwest while living in Washington D.C.

Here is a review from my blog:

i stayed up until one o’clock finishing o, pioneers by willa cather this morning and almost died it was so good. i like to read cather when i’m homesick. i know she is writing about nebraska, but her descriptions of the plains are painfully beautiful and remind me so much of the farms around owatonna.

i also love...more This book just reinforced for me how much I love Willa Cather. I read it when I was homesick for the prairies of the Midwest while living in Washington D.C.

Here is a review from my blog:

i stayed up until one o’clock finishing o, pioneers by willa cather this morning and almost died it was so good. i like to read cather when i’m homesick. i know she is writing about nebraska, but her descriptions of the plains are painfully beautiful and remind me so much of the farms around owatonna.

i also love that cather was this fantastic, gifted, gender bending lesbian trapped in victorian culture. her writing always manages to convey this in such fascinating ways. in everything i have read about cather’s life there is this great sense of the tension between who a person is, who they are meant to be, and who they have actually become. cather moves to new york city when she’s young and gets this great job as an editor, but what she really wants to do is write. so she creates this mediocre novel that is essentially a second rate version of henry james. other people like it, but cather is unsatisfied…she just can’t seem to find her own voice. frustrated, she leaves new york city and travels to visit her brother and to visit her parents in her hometown on the prairies of nebraska. this is where she finally finds her story. she starts composing o, pioneers and finishes it after returning to the east coast. she subsequently writes several more books and stories about life on the great plains including my antonia and the song of the lark.

i love that cather had to go home before she found her story. she had to reconcile where she came from, her roots, with the version of herself she had spent her twenties creating. and it is in this reconciliation that she must have realized she needed both. home is where she writes about and she writes it beautifully, but she needed both who she was and who she had become to find her authentic voice. roots and wings. somewhere along the line we all figure out we need them both. a lesson i’m still trying to learn.

willa cather was definitely a katie girl. and i envy her (as any author would) for finding the story she was born to tell. you can see her settling into the language of o, pioneers. the prose is absolutely effortless because she is speaking a truth from her own life, complications and all.

i leave you for the weekend with one of my favorite passages, and a promise that i will be back with a new entry for the katie girl project next tuesday. until then:

“she had never known before how much the country meant to her. the chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. she had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.”

me too, willa. me too.(less)

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Feb 13, 2013 Owen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, want-to-buy, favorites

“We hadn’t any of us much to do with it, Carl. The land did it. It had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself. It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still. As for me, you remember when I began to buy land. For years after that I was always squeezing and borrowing until I was ashamed to show my face in the banks. And the...more “We hadn’t any of us much to do with it, Carl. The land did it. It had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself. It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still. As for me, you remember when I began to buy land. For years after that I was always squeezing and borrowing until I was ashamed to show my face in the banks. And then, all at once, men began to come to me offering to lend me money- and I didn’t need it!”

O Pioneers! is an excellent book. It is about a young Swedish immigrant girl named Alexandra Bergson, whom inherits her father’s farm in Nebraska and is forced to make money off of it whilst helping her bewidowed mother raise her family. Alexandra has a few brothers, including Emil, one of the other main characters, and one of my personal favorites. Although each character is so unique and distinctive.

I love that this book is so original. It isn’t about people wanting to leave their towns for the big city, it is about immigrants moving to the middle of nowhere hoping that they will be able to make a living off the land. So in a way, they try to create “the big city”, although it’s really just a small town with European immigrants. But for them, this is them making it in America.

Toward the end, I knew I loved this book. The completely unexpected plot twist threw me off guard and it was so well-done, and didn’t trip up the plot or anything. This book has excellent character development and Willa Cather’s writing is so good. I think I am probably going to buy this book because I know I will want to reread it many times. (As of today, 2/13/13, this book is available on Amazon for $2.25 as a paperback or $0.99 for Kindle. It is less than 150 pages so it will be a quick read for whenever I am in the mood to read it).

O Pioneers! is probably one of the best classics I have ever read. I am so glad I picked it up at the library. I would highly recommend this book to anyone.
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Jan 30, 2013 Tiffany Larson rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A good choice for high school students selecting a classic to read. It is a quick, easy read, with no complex prose or story lines. My edition was only 169 pages. Although it contains a few racy elements (including murder and fornication), these scenes are handled in an airy, detached, non-descript way--in my opinion, because anything else would have been scandalous in 1913, when the book was published. (Yet another reason to stick to classics.) The murder is obvious, but not pre-meditated and n...more

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Jan 07, 2013 Wally Beddoe rated it 4 of 5 stars

In "O Pioneers", the Bergson's are working hard to prosper but how did they obtain their Nebraska farm?

Alexandra's father migrated to America with hopes of creating a better life for his family. He and his wife left a very rough life in Sweden where most Europeans were suffering from a bad economy and crop failure on their farms in what little land they had. In America, the United States Government was giving away land under what was called the Homestead Act.

The cry was FREE LAND!! The Homestead...more In "O Pioneers", the Bergson's are working hard to prosper but how did they obtain their Nebraska farm?

Alexandra's father migrated to America with hopes of creating a better life for his family. He and his wife left a very rough life in Sweden where most Europeans were suffering from a bad economy and crop failure on their farms in what little land they had. In America, the United States Government was giving away land under what was called the Homestead Act.

The cry was FREE LAND!! The Homestead Act of 1862, was one of the most significant and enduring events in the westward expansion of the United States. By granting 160 acres of free land to claimants, it allowed nearly any man or woman a chance to live the American dream. (Walvoord History.com)

Many also knew that the Homestead Act offered them their only real opportunity to ever be landowners and to achieve the American dream of land and home ownership. How else could a poor person get 160 acres and a farm of his or her own? Once acquired, they often swore they would hold the land the rest of their lives. Through the actions and attitudes of so many, the Homestead Act was responsible for the settlement of nearly ten percent of all the land in the 48 continental United States and Alaska. (Walvoord History.com)

Many Swedes moved to the Midwest to claim their stake but when they arrived, they found that the land was much different than the land they were used to farming in their country. Instead of rolling hills, valleys, and plentiful rivers and lakes, the land they received as part of the Homestead Act was barren and nearly impossible to farm. Their experiences and knowledge of farming in Sweden was almost useless in Nebraska. Many people moved away after initial efforts to work their land. Alexandra's father was one of the few who stayed but had he remained healthy, who knows if he would have had the motivation to stay as did his daughter Alexandra.

To summarize, the Homestead Act of 1862 sounded like the American Dream to many Civil War veterans and immigrants but the government gave the best land to the railroad companies and what was left was given to the qualifying applicants. Although the land was awful and nearly impossible to farm, these immigrants worked hard and many were successful in building farms, communities, and businesses which became the towns and cities we know today.

References:

Walvoord History.com. (n.d.). The homestead act of 1862. Retrieved from http://walvoordhistory.com/destinatio...

uen.org. (n.d.). Native americans. Retrieved from http://www.uen.org/themepark/liberty/...
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Dec 28, 2012 Zohar - ManOfLaBook.com rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012

O Pioneers!By Willa Cather was written in 1913 and is considered the first novel of the Great Plains trilogy. The novel has many themes including isolation, love and feminism.

The Bergsons immigrated from Switzerland to Hanover, Nebraska at the turn of the 20th Century. When the patriarch of the family dies, his daughter Alexandra, inherits the farm and devotes her life to making it a viable enterprise at a time when others give up and leave.

I’ve only been recently introduced...more O Pioneers!By Willa Cather was written in 1913 and is considered the first novel of the Great Plains trilogy. The novel has many themes including isolation, love and feminism.

The Bergsons immigrated from Switzerland to Hanover, Nebraska at the turn of the 20th Century. When the patriarch of the family dies, his daughter Alexandra, inherits the farm and devotes her life to making it a viable enterprise at a time when others give up and leave.

I’ve only been recently introduced to the writing of Willa Cather. I believe it was on some “top 100” list (who said they’re lame?) and figured I’ll give it a try.

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather is considered a classic and I can certainly understand why. The writing is outstanding and it has all the makings of the great American novel. The story tells of hard work, wide eyed innocence towards the future and opportunities abound as seen through the eyes of the immigrant class.

The scenery plays a major part in the novel, the lyrical episodes about the pastoral land are sprawling and majestic. As is with many other novels, the setting of the harsh and beautiful land is playing out as another character in the book. The Midwestern prairie which the pioneers labor over is an essential part of character development and profound understanding of themselves, the land and life.

On the contrary, the parts which deal with people are concise and sparring much like the personalities of those that worked the acrid land. Cather manages to convey the sense of community despite the vastness of the land, a testament to her writing skills and ability to personalize a storyline.

While I loved the descriptions and prose, the dialog seemed a bit stilted, it just didn’t seem as if that’s how the characters wouldspeak, especially when among friends and relatives. However the storyline is exemplary and the characterization – amazing; I found myself caring about the people in the story and breathlessly waiting to find out what will happen to them.

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Nov 29, 2012 Emily rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: grown-up-books, classic

Why I picked it up: I first read it as a sophomore in college as a part of my American Lit class. It’s been a favorite of mine ever since and I’ve read it several times. This particular time (November 2012) was for the Classics book group at my library.

Alexandra Bergson is the oldest of four children born to a Norwegian immigrant now living on the Nebraska prairie. As her father lays on his deathbed, he realizes it is his daughter and not his sons that has a love of the land. Her brothers want t...more

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Oct 11, 2012 Thom Swennes rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: everyone

I started reading this book because my family, like the ones described, were of Scandinavian decent and I had often wondered what my forefathers (and mothers) experienced as first, second and third generation Americans. Willa Cather really lives up to her reputation with her book O Pioneers. Her works serve as the perfect bridge between the writer’s styles of the 19th Century and those of the middle and late 20th Century. O Pioneers is a compelling story about European immigrants carving out a n...more

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Sep 21, 2012 Karen Chung rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book starts out low-key and moves rather slowly over quite a few chapters, and the ending leaves the book feeling only partially completed. Part 4, however, is full of quite brilliant writing and insights. Cather obviously felt the things she was writing about deeply herself or she simply couldn't have written about them so lucidly and in such intricate detail. Here's a paragraph from Part 4, Chapter 1 that impressed me - and there are many others:

"Frank's case was all the more painful beca...more This book starts out low-key and moves rather slowly over quite a few chapters, and the ending leaves the book feeling only partially completed. Part 4, however, is full of quite brilliant writing and insights. Cather obviously felt the things she was writing about deeply herself or she simply couldn't have written about them so lucidly and in such intricate detail. Here's a paragraph from Part 4, Chapter 1 that impressed me - and there are many others:

"Frank's case was all the more painful because he had no one in particular to fix his jealousy upon. Sometimes he could have thanked the man who would bring him evidence against his wife. He had discharged a good farm-boy, Jan Smirka, because he thought Marie was fond of him; but she had not seemed to miss Jan when he was gone, and she had been just as kind to the next boy. The farm-hands would always do anything for Marie; Frank couldn't find one so surly that he would not make an effort to please her. At the bottom of his heart Frank knew well enough that if he could once give up his grudge, his wife would come back to him. But he could never in the world do that. The grudge was fundamental. Perhaps he could not have given it up if he had tried. Perhaps he got more satisfaction out of feeling himself abused than he would have got out of being loved. If he could once have made Marie thoroughly unhappy, he might have relented and raised her from the dust. But she had never humbled herself. In the first days of their love she had been his slave; she had admired him abandonedly. But the moment he began to bully her and to be unjust, she began to draw away; at first in tearful amazement, then in quiet, unspoken disgust. The distance between them had widened and hardened. It no longer contracted and brought them suddenly together. The spark of her life went somewhere else, and he was always watching to surprise it. He knew that somewhere she must get a feeling to live upon, for she was not a woman who could live without loving. He wanted to prove to himself the wrong he felt. What did she hide in her heart? Where did it go? Even Frank had his churlish delicacies; he never reminded her of how much she had once loved him. For that Marie was grateful to him."

I listened to this as a Librivox audio book while hiking, and it was easy to follow and enjoyable - I got through it in about three hikes. I tend to choose a new author after finishing a substantial work like a full novel, but this time I have downloaded My Ántonia and a number of shorter works of Cather's as well. Cather was criticized by Granville Hicks - and others - for "failing to confront 'contemporary life as it is' and escaping into an idealized past" (Wikipedia). America had already moved on by the time Cather was writing her novels about life on the Nebraska prairie. But it is obvious that that is where she found her muse and the vehicles to carry the stories and life insights she had to share with the world, and these are timeless. (less)

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Sep 15, 2012 Jim rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, historical

I've heard about this for years. It's supposed to be a classic & I don't know exactly what I expected, but this wasn't it. There wasn't enough detail to really catch my attention. It was a bit of a character study of the strong people that built our country, but they were all caricatures. Silly, virginal love threads intertwined with tough characters in a really interesting landscape & time that didn't get nearly enough attention. A lot of good elements, but it just didn't do much for me...more

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Aug 30, 2012 Dan rated it 3 of 5 stars

I think Cather camouflages the central conflict in this story: Alexandra is the boss of her brothers, and they accept it until she gets too uppity. Halfway in the book hapless loser Carl hangs around her house itchin' to propose to her. In a very tense exchange, her brothers come by and tell her that she better not even think of marrying him and creating sons that will get in the way of their childrens' inheritence. Alexandra laughs in their face. "Bitches, please. You're going to stop me? You w...more

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Aug 14, 2012 Moriah rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, for-school

I loved the character Alexandra because she reminds me of my mom. The characters in O Pioneers are all very realistic and I often find myself comparing many of them to the people I already know. The book was slow but it drew you in. I guess I never got the full experience of the book because I stopped 1 chapter short of what I would consider the beginning of the climax (Mede) and had to spark note the rest for a test (I later finished it). My teacher had several quotes on said test and all were...more

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Aug 04, 2012 Owen rated it 1 of 5 stars

O Pioneers! is possibly one of the worst books I have read in the past few months. In fact, it might as well be the worst. The character reactions are unrealistic and often rash, the book has no story other than the life of a few people who grow up on a farm, and the book itself is horribly written. The beginning of this book (I refuse to call it a story, as it is not) starts out with a family and some friends that have very little money and are really quite poor. I will not put a spoiler alert...more

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About Willa Cather

Wilella Sibert Cather is an eminent author from the United States. She is perhaps best known for her depictions of U.S. life in novels such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop.

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Quotes from O Pioneers!

“And now the old story has begun to write itself over there," said Carl softly. "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; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years.” — 51 people liked it

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off.” — 41 people liked it

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O Pioneers! (Great Plains trilogy #1)

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