Books with title O, Pioneers!

MP3 CD Format Life on the divide was a struggle for the pioneering Bergson family. Alexandra, both tough as nails and tender as a budding blossom, faces and conquers the harsh realities of early settlers in Nebraska.The struggle for life, love, and meaning permeate this timeless classic. Willa Cather captures the imagination with her vivid portrayals of the landscape and the enduring desire to achieve a dream.

O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works. "The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman," writes Willa Cather in O Pioneers! The country is America; the woman is Alexandra Bergson, a fiercely independent young Swedish immigrant girl who inherits her father’s farm in Nebraska. A model of emotional strength, courage, and resolve, Alexandra fights long and hard to transform her father’s patch of raw, wind-blasted prairie into a highly profitable business. A gripping saga of love, murder, greed, failure, and triumph, O Pioneers! vividly portrays the hardships of prairie life. Above all, it champions the belief that hard work is the surest road to personal fulfillment. Described upon publication in The New York Times as “American in the best sense of the word,” O Pioneers! celebrates the men and women who struggled to build a nation that is both compelling and contradictory. Chris Kraus is the author of Aliens & Anorexia, I Love Dick, and the forthcoming novel, Torpor. She is co-editor of Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotexte Reader, and edits Semiotexte Native Agents, a series of mostly female underground fiction.

Willa Cather said that O Pioneers! was her first authentic novel, “the first time I walked off on my own feet—everything before was half real and half an imitation of writers whom I admired.” Cather’s novel of life on the Nebraska frontier established her reputation as a writer of great note and marked a significant turning point in her artistic development. No longer would she let literary convention guide the form of her writing; the materials themselves would dictate the structure. The paperback edition contains all the text and scholarly apparatus found in the original Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association, this volume presents the full range of biographical, historical, and textual information on the novel.

O Pioneers! is a story of the immigrants who came to America to build new lives for themselves. Struggling against poverty, ignorance, drought, and storm, they came to love and understand the land, until it rewarded them with a richness exceeding all imaginings. The Bergsons are a family of strong-willed Swedish immigrants who have come to make a living on the great prairie. When the father, John, dies, worn out by disease and debt, his eldest daughter, Alexandra, becomes the head of the family. This is the story of her love affair with the land--an American Midwest that is vast and golden.

One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them.

First published in 1913, Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! is the first part of the author’s well-known Prairie Trilogy – a series of three books that have no characters or specific locations in common, the only feature that links the three stories together being the principal theme, the life of people on the Great Plains.The story starts in 1880 and it introduces the Bergsons, a family of emigrants from Sweden who have come to the region in Nebraska known as the Divide to farm a plot of land. The soil in the area is not really suitable for farming and when the head of the family dies and leaves the task of running to farm to his daughter, Alexandra, the young woman is faced with a dilemma: should she stay on the land and hope her efforts and her hard work will be rewarded, or sell the farm, like her neighbors, and hope for an easier livelihood? She makes the difficult decision eventually and she makes her choice when it comes to marrying the man she loves as well.O Pioneers! is a naturalist novel with lots of beautiful descriptions of landscapes, but the focus is on human relationships. The landscapes, the descriptions of the farming procedures are combined with psychological insight in a masterful way. The Midwest prairies, the hard life of the settlers in the region provide excellent circumstances for creating complex characters and it is not only the character of Alexandra that is multi-colored and detailed, but all the other characters as well, male and female alike. The two other parts in the trilogy are The Song of the Lark, published in 1915, and My Antonia,which came out in 1918 – if you loved this wonderful story, you will surely like Willa Cather’s other masterpieces as well.