Other editions of book O Pioneers: Color Illustrated, Formatted for E-Readers

Willa Cather was an American author who wrote novels about the frontier life on the Great Plains. Her most famous novels are My Antonia and One of Ours, the latter of which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. O Pioneers! was published in 1913 and was the first novel of the Great Plains Trilogy. The story i set in Nebraska at the turn of the 20th century and follows the lives of a Swedish family.

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.

"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.

"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.</div>

O Pioneers! tells the story of the Bergsons, a family of Swedish-American immigrants in the farm country near the fictional[1] town of Hanover, Nebraska, at the turn of the 20th century.Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I.Cather grew up in Virginia and Nebraska, and graduated from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33 she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick.