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O Pioneers!

by Willa Cather

3.75 · rating details · 9,409 ratings · 867 reviews

O Pioneers tells the story of the Bergsons, a family of Swedish immigrants in the farm country near the fictional town of Hanover, Nebraska, at the turn of the 20th century. Alexandra, inherits the family farm when her father dies, and she devotes her life to making the farm a viable enterprise at a time when other immigrant families are giving up and leaving the prairie.

Paperback, 128 pages

Published August 24th 2008 by Smk Books (first published November 30th 1912)

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Jun 16, 2010

Sparrow rated it

· review of another edition

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...moreAlexandra 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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Nov 05, 2007

Sarah rated it

· review of another edition

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 lesbi...moreI 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.

(less)

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Oct 25, 2007

Jennifer rated it

· review of another edition

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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May 26, 2008

Brian rated it

· review of another edition

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...more

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Apr 08, 2008

Rebecca rated it

· review of another edition

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 actua...more

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Jul 03, 2008

Steven rated it

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"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 precisio...more

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Jan 10, 2008

snackywombat (v.m.) rated it

· review of another edition

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 ...moreFrom 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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Dec 17, 2007

Tia rated it

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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 natio...more

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Nov 28, 2007

Brandon rated it

· review of another edition

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 dynami...more

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Nov 29, 2008

Jennifer rated it

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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

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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...more

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Sep 25, 2007

Hillary rated it

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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

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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 t...more

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Feb 13, 2009

Ellen rated it

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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 a...moreThis 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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Nov 25, 2011

Mark rated it

· review of another edition

Recommends it for: commuters

Recommended to Mark by: Ivan

My journey from Poole in Dorset up to London on the train and then back again yesterday was made so easy by virtue of reading this book that I did not even notice that i was 20 mins late into London in the morning and 40 mins late back into Poole last night. Well maybe a little but it was certainly made less frustrating. This was a quite wonderful novel in so many ways and the danger would be that I could collapse into cliche but I shall try to restrain myself.

You know how often peo...more

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Oct 29, 2011

B rated it

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Shelves: i-own, includes-a-love-story, death, adult-fiction

I was frustrated in the end because Alexandra didn't have the opportunity to find love. Real, passionate love like the fabled 'youth' in the poem a the beginning of the book and all throughout. She spent so much time taking care of her family that she didn't get to have her own life. She found fulfillment in a lot of other ways, but I still think it is sad. I am glad that she and Carl could be together, and I thought they would love each other a lot, but it seemed like it was more convenience an...more

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Sep 30, 2011

Tatasoutsidevoice rated it

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This book didn't grab and hold me immediately like Song of the Lark.
There was a turning point when it did; I won't spoil the plot and go in to the details.
I'm glad I stuck with it. Warm, descriptive, insightful writing style with depth - typical Willa Cather style.
I feel like she (Cather) gets (understands) me:

"They have their own way of doing things, and they do not altogether like my way, I am afraid.
Perhaps they think me too independent. But I have h...more

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Jul 30, 2011

James (JD) Dittes added it · review of another edition

Cather's Nebraska is every bit as vivid and integral a character to her work as John Steinbeck's California is in his. Considering that Steinbeck is my favorite author, it really elevates Cather, in my eyes to one of the top five in American literature.

The key to understanding O Pioneers is knowing how the land--maybe I should capitalize, The Land--works in the novel. Considering how she basically wallops the reader with this point in the last three pages, it shouldn't be hard to miss.

Withou...more

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Jul 16, 2011

Crysta rated it

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This book snuck up on me and then promptly whomped me over the head. It's so beautifully written, you can see and smell and hear the prairie all around you, just as it was in turn-of-the-century Nebraska. But there are some very deep, very real themes and plotlines lurking beneath all the pastoral prose, and Cather has it exactly right: "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 coun...more

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Jun 10, 2011

Louise Turner rated it

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I reread O Pioneers for a book review I was doing at a retirement village. While it is not my favorite of Willa Cather's work--My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop are my favorites--I do like this story of a strong independent woman living in a time when women were not encouraged to be strong and independent. Alexandra Bergson was only a girl when her father, on his deathbed, left her in charge of managing the family farm. Although she had 3 younger brothers and normally the farm wou...more

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May 24, 2011

Eugenia Kim added it · review of another edition

This classic story of an early Iowan family struggling to farm the raw frontier still resonates with strong and memorable characters and a plot rife with missed opportunities. At its center is a young girl who becomes a powerful landowning woman, eventually estranged from her brothers for their jealousy and, Cather says, their Norwegian reticent stubborn stickler ways for routine and sameness. Though strong in heart, body and spirit, she is lonely, as her best friend from childhood, Carl, feels...more

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Feb 14, 2011

Brian rated it

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Set at the end of the nineteenth century, O Pioneers tells the story of Alexandra Bergson, a Swedish immigrant to Nebraska, as well as that of her family and the community that surrounds them. It depicts their struggle to make a living in land that had never before been broken to the plough.

There is a clarity and a simple beauty to the prose that I found immediately appealing; and through every page runs an almost overwhelming sense of place. Willa Cather knows and clearly loves the ...more

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Jan 03, 2011

Larry Gordon rated it

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Another classic that most people probably read in high school – never too late to catch up on school work at age 60.

I’m a sucker for the pioneers-working-the-land-surviving-against-all-odds stories. And having a woman as the hero and strong central character – in a 1913 novel – was wonderful. A New York Times review when the book was published said “some might call it a feminist novel”. Well, yeah… perhaps with some shortcomings from a 21st century perspective, but a powerful stat...more

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Oct 19, 2010

Alison rated it

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"...off in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him... we sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at hundreds of our own kind and shudder."

Every now and then everyone finds themselves lost in themselves and the world they live in, not really sure of who they are and what significance they actually have. To me, ...more

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Jul 22, 2010

ICPL Staff Picks added it · review of another edition

Shelves: anne, fiction, staff-picks-blog

After publishing her first novel (Alexander’s Bridge), Willa Cather had a moment straight out of Little Women. She wrote a story about an aristocratic man that was torn between two women and, to the disappointment of Cather, her novel was not received well by critics. She was told by Sarah Orne Jewett she needed to write what she knew and she turned to her childhood on the Nebraska prairie for inspiration.

I would like to thank Jewett for that advice because the next novel Cather wr...more

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Apr 15, 2010

Mimi rated it

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Wow! So, I finished Cather's Song of a Lark yesterday, and I wondered to myself if Cather could let anyone be married and happy other than the old couple that got one paragraph in Lark. Then I read O Pioneers! today and get my answer. This book did have some happy marriages. Of course, the main marriage on display is miserable, but Cather did justice to all of the reasons why it was miserable and showed how it could have been happy if the characters had just made different decisions.

...more

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Mar 29, 2010

Ben rated it

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In a letter to her friend, the journalist Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Willa Cather acknowledged the dominance of regional details in O Pioneers! by explaining, “I wanted to let the country be the hero.” This is confirmed by even the most cursory review of titles for the five major parts of the novel: The Wild Lands, Neighboring Fields, Winter Memories, The White Mulberry Tree, and Alexandra. Even the main character, Alexandra acknowledges that she views the country as something like a protagon...moreIn a letter to her friend, the journalist Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Willa Cather acknowledged the dominance of regional details in O Pioneers! by explaining, “I wanted to let the country be the hero.” This is confirmed by even the most cursory review of titles for the five major parts of the novel: The Wild Lands, Neighboring Fields, Winter Memories, The White Mulberry Tree, and Alexandra. Even the main character, Alexandra acknowledges that she views the country as something like a protagonist, explaining her success at farming thus: “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.”

Of course, all this somewhat stuffy and repetitious dialogue amounts to so much metaphor. The land is figured in Alexandra, and Carl is the poor dupe busting his rear trying to figure out how to plow her, which is not to say, this isn’t a classic American novel in its own right. Still, insofar as the land emerges as a major player in Cather’s story, it does so at the expense of flattening characters—mostly notably male characters—this seems to be primarily the effect of the mythological scope of the novel’s perspective. Nevertheless, in passages like the opening paragraph this telescopic and historic angle charges Cather’s prose with an amazing power and movement. The difficulty seems to arise in alternating between this skillful use of the panoramic view and a more heavy handed approach, which becomes increasingly oblivious toward the final movement of the novel. Take for example this interchange: “You belong to the land,” Carl murmured, “as you have always said. Now more than ever.” (As if this isn’t hitting us over the head enough) Alexandra’s reply: “Yes, now more than ever. You remember what you once said about the graveyard, and the old story writing itself over? Only it is we who write it, with the best we have.”

A more subtle difficulty is one of credulity. When compared with Alexandra’s admission of the land’s sovereignty it seems contradictory to claim the pioneers have made a lasting impression on the land. I think this uncertainty feeds into my feeling of coldness from the character of Alexandra. She stands in sharp contrast with her playful Swedish and Bohemian girlfriends, moving through the pages like a statue, largely unchanging in both her love and her grief.
I would argue this is the primary difficult of the novel’s enlarged scope. What movement there is across this scenery is dwarfed by the view. Cather’s panoramic technique is effective—especially when the author trains her eye on descriptions of the place—but in the absence of descriptions of those same movements on the human scale, the lasting impression is distant and cold. By way of counterpoint, the novel does succeed in certain instances to balance both perspectives—most notably in the tragic scene of The White Mulberry Tree. Still, at the novel’s end, Cather’s decision to give the land the last word falls flat in the light of the incredulity that the character’s themselves have expressed about the land’s ability to feel anything.
(less)

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Jan 03, 2010

Charity rated it

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Willa Cather has a way of making the early pioneers of Nebraska live.

Alexandra, the protagonist, is left to run the farm with her brothers and mother when their father dies. She is a visionary and convinces her brothers to not sell out when times are tough. She puts so much of herself into the farm that her life passes by quickly and she doesn't marry. Her older brothers do not recognize her work and have the gall to be embarassed by her independent nature. Her younger brother ...more

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Sep 27, 2009

Deborah Moulton rated it

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I identified with this book because my paternal grandmother emigrated from Sweden and homesteaded in South Dakota about time this book was written about Nebraska.

The hardness of the life of early pioneers is shown with tact and dignity in this book which is to say it is clearly written in an earlier era. Many modern authors write with a certain hyperbolic sense of the immensity of their choices or tragedies. It just makes them seem entitled and neurotic in comparison to the spare pr...more

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Jul 28, 2009

Maria rated it

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I have read several of Willa Cather's books and I think that this one is my favorite. Willa Cather's writing in this novel is like the vast sweeping land of Nebraska that she describes. Sometimes the book moves so slowly that one thinks, "Where is this going? Is anything going to happen?" And then like a cloud burst one is brought face to face with human passion and anguish. There are passages that describe the land that take one's breath away and sudden insights into human behavior...moreI have read several of Willa Cather's books and I think that this one is my favorite. Willa Cather's writing in this novel is like the vast sweeping land of Nebraska that she describes. Sometimes the book moves so slowly that one thinks, "Where is this going? Is anything going to happen?" And then like a cloud burst one is brought face to face with human passion and anguish. There are passages that describe the land that take one's breath away and sudden insights into human behavior and emotions that leave one reflective. One passage describes winter in the Divide as "the season in which Nature recuperates, in which she sinks to sleep between the fullness of autumn and the passion of spring. The birds have gone. The teeming life that goes on down int he long grass is exterminated...The ground is frozen so hard that it bruises the foot to walk in the roads...It is like an iron country and the spirit is oppressed by its rigor and melancholy. One could easily believe that in that dead landscape the germs of life and fruitfulness were extinct forever." In this novel, Alexandra, the main character, finds fulfillment in the autumn of her life, while her younger brother, Emil, finds passion and death in the spring of his life. The land is also a central character as it shapes and comforts and nurtures, as well as kills, the very life that depends on it. For some who have never left it, it can suffocate, as Alexandra explains her reasons for wanting her brother Emil to leave, to her good friend Carl: "Perhaps I am like Carrie Jensen,... She had never been out of the cornfields, and a few years ago she got despondent and said life was just the same thing over and over and she didn't see the use of it. After she had tried to kill herself once or twice, her folks got worried and sent her over to Iowa to visit some relations. Ever since she's come back she's been perfectly cheerful, and she says she's contented to live and work in a world that's so big and interesting." As I turned over the last page of the book, I felt sad -- sad for the star-crossed lovers, for the waste of life, the dumb husband, and even for Alexandra, who finally free to marry the man she has loved all her life, has lost her brother and a dear friend. She was a woman possessed of immense strength but also of a kind of emotional blindness that prevented her from "reading" people around her until it was too late. (less)

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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.” — 28 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.” — 25 people liked it

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