‘Cather allows a glimpse into the depths of emotion that lie beneath this deceptively simple surface’ GUARDIAN
‘She is undoubtedly one of the greatest American writers’ OBSERVER
‘This beautiful book . . . May it live forever’ NEW YORKER
Alexandra Bergson is the eldest child of a Swedish immigrant family newly arrived in the harsh untamed landscape of the American West. An original, determined child, she is driven by two forces: her fierce protective love for her younger brother and a deep love of the beautiful country she has come to regard as her own. When her father dies, it is she who becomes the head of the family and struggles to soften the wild overgrown soil that surrounds her, nurturing it until, finally, it rewards her with a richness beyond measure . . .
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.
‘She is undoubtedly one of the greatest American writers’ OBSERVER
‘This beautiful book . . . May it live forever’ NEW YORKER
Alexandra Bergson is the eldest child of a Swedish immigrant family newly arrived in the harsh untamed landscape of the American West. An original, determined child, she is driven by two forces: her fierce protective love for her younger brother and a deep love of the beautiful country she has come to regard as her own. When her father dies, it is she who becomes the head of the family and struggles to soften the wild overgrown soil that surrounds her, nurturing it until, finally, it rewards her with a richness beyond measure . . .
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.
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Reviews
Her voice, laconical and richly sensuous, sings out with a note of unequivocal love for the people she is setting down on the page
Willa Cather's second novel is abundant with interwoven themes. In one respect Cather bears witness to the early 20th-century Pioneers. The farmer taming the wild Northern States of America, battling with the elements and an unforgiving land to create a
This beautiful book - like a memory, almost, rather than a representation - just had its hundredth birthday. May it live forever
She is undoubtedly one of the twentieth century's greatest American writers
The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us
When we read the novel, what is indeed amazing is how absent the war, or any sense of external danger to the world she's writing about, is
She is undoubtedly one of the greatest American writers
Cather allows a glimpse into the depths of emotion that lie beneath this deceptively simple surface
