Other editions of book O Pioneers!

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.

At the turn of the twentieth century. When their father dies young, exhausted by the failure of his attempts at agriculture, it is left to the visionary Alexandra to guide the family to prosperity and safeguard the fortune of her brothers. Strong-willed and fiercely independent, she succeeds against all odds, but only at the cost of her own fulfilment as a woman. Central to the novel's action is the Nebraskan landscape it describes, by turns unyielding and fruitful, bitter and ecstatic.O Pioneers! joins Cather's My Antonia in Everyman's Library.

First published in 1913, O Pioneers! was hailed as by the critics as "a totally new kind of story," with characters "new in American fiction" and a heroine who was "a new and interesting type." Cather's heroine, Alexandra Bergson, would, in fact, become the model for the pioneer women of later literature. Spirited, courageous, and independent, the daughter of Swedish immigrants, Alexandra assumes responsibility for the family farm—and her family—upon death of her father. Her devotion to the harsh, forbidding prairie transforms her land and her life.

“One of the century’s greatest American writers.” -The Observer A Pulitzer Prize–winning novel celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2013, this is a tale of people struggling to carve out a life in the wilderness while battling ever-duplicitous human nature. O Pioneers!, Willa Cather's first great novel, is the classic American story of pioneer life as embodied by one remarkable woman and her singular devotion to the land. Alexandra Bergson's father, John, is dying. He entrusts his farmstead on a desolate stretch of plain to her, rather than to her brothers. Faced with the rigors of frontier living, droughts, and penury, Alexandra only becomes more determined to carry on her father's legacy and battles through remortgaging the farm and adopting new techniques. In this unforgettable story, Cather conveys both the physical realities of the landscape, as well as the mythic sweep of the transformation of the frontier, more faithfully and perhaps more fully than any other work of fiction. Written in 1913, O Pioneers! was the first in Cather's "Great Plains" trilogy, and it was followed by The Song of the Lark and My Antonia.

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The first novel in Willa Cather's Prairie Trilogy tells the story of the Bergsons, a family of immigrants eking out a hardscrabble life as farmers in Nebraska at the turn of the nineteenth century. Alexandra, the eldest child of Bergson patriarch John, inherits the family farm when her father dies. Left to raise her father's three sons and somehow turn a struggling farm around, Alexandra is tasked with pulling her family up by its bootstraps.