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O Pioneers! is a 1913 novel by American author Willa Cather, written while she was living in New York. It was her second published novel. The title is a reference to a poem by Walt Whitman entitled "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" from Leaves of Grass (1855).
3.89. 54,051 ratings4,159 reviews. O Pioneers! (1913) was Willa Cather's first great novel, and to many it remains her unchallenged masterpiece. No other work of fiction so faithfully conveys both the sharp physical realities and the mythic sweep of the transformation of the American frontier—and the transformation of the people who settled it.
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O Pioneers!, regional novel by American writer Willa Cather, published in 1913. The work is known for its vivid re-creation of the hardships of prairie life and of the struggle of immigrant pioneer women. The novel was partially based on Cather’s Nebraska childhood, and it reflected the author’s.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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O Pioneers!, published in 1913, is a novel by Willa Cather that tells the story of the Bergsons, a family of Swedish immigrants, as they struggle to make a life for themselves on the Nebraska prairie. The novel is divided into five parts, each of which corresponds to a different period in the life of the novel’s protagonist, Alexandra Bergson.
He was not thinking about the tired pioneers over whom his blade glittered. The old wild country, the struggle was destined to succeed while so many men broke their hearts and died, he can scarcely remember.
O Pioneers! opens on a blustery winter day, in the town of Hanover, Nebraska, sometime between 1883 and 1890. The narrator introduces four principal characters: the very young Emil Bergson; his stalwart older sister, Alexandra; her gloomy friend Carl Linstrum; and a pretty little Bohemian child, Marie Shabata.
At once a sophisticated pastoral and a prototype for later feminist novels, O Pioneers! is a work in which triumph is inextricably enmeshed with tragedy, a story of people who do not claim a land so much as they submit to it and, in the process, become greater than they were.
