Can we even imagine what it was like for the early homesteaders and pioneers, arriving (most likely) from somewhere in Europe in a last-ditch effort to make something out of nothing? There it is before them – a vast, lonely, rolling plain of earth meeting a vast, lonely, infinite sky. Where does one even begin?In this novel, Willa Cather takes us on a journey where we see exactly where it begins – with sod huts or log cabins or some form of shelter. Then comes the dawn to dark labour of breaking...

Willa Cather appears to write so effortlessly or, perhaps, I should say, her prose reads so effortlessly. Her characters ring true and the land looms over them all. Of course Cather lived on that prairie and knew that land. Cather knew farm families like the Bergsons and possibly a woman like Alexandra Bergson, whose life was fully formed and influenced by the land.There are different views of the land's influence on its people: "John Bergson had the Old-World belief that land, in itself, is des...

I was entranced by the Nebraska prairie and a wonderful leading woman, living a century ago: a time and place I have never been, but which leaped from the pages, with simple craftsmanship, to sculpt the landscape of my mind’s eye, as Alexandra transformed both her fields and the lives of those around her.The final thirteen pages felt written by or about a different person, not the author and protagonist I thought I knew. Prairie SpringThe novel opens with a poem contrasting the harsh landscape w...

Alexandra looked at him mournfully. “I try to be more liberal about such things than I used to be. I try to realize that we are not all made alike.”Everything in O Pioneers! is beauty to me. I am so in love with this book. Maybe it is because I have it in my brain that pioneers by definition suck that Willa Cather always catches me by surprise and turns me upside down. It’s like walking through an alien landscape and then running into my best friend. I thought what I would find was Michael Lando...

O Pioneers (Great Plains Trilogy #1), Willa Cather O Pioneers! is a 1913 novel, by American author Willa Cather, written while she was living in New York. It is the first novel of her Great Plains trilogy, followed by The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). O Pioneers! tells the story of the Bergsons, a family of Swedish-American immigrants in the farm country, near the fictional town of Hanover, Nebraska, at the turn of the 20th century. The main character, Alexandra Bergson, inheri...

I've circumvented Willa Cather's works my entire reading life, and I don't know, at this moment if I was wrong, because I didn't much care for this novel. Rather than the "spare prose and brutal story lines" that I was promised, I found uneven prose and a story that bordered on the edge of tediousness. It danced so close to downright boring, that I found myself skipping entire passages, and then forcing myself to go back, just to be fair. At best, I would rate this one as a "good enough" story f...

Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years. If you've read Willa Cather's famous My Antonia, you're already aware of the Bohemian community, those farming pioneers of the American frontier she writes about. The young Swede protagonist of this novel, Alexandra Bergson, is familiar; she grows

The area called "The Divide" and the Nebraska landscape figure almost as characters in Cather's novel, O Pioneers! just as the Mississippi River does in Mark Twain's works. Willa Cather has a wonderfully wistful sense of the land & its importance. Beyond that however, there are pulls & tugs, as some of Cather's characters portray a keen sense of the need to expand their horizons, to explore the world beyond. The focal point in the novel, "Alex" (Alexandra Bergson), while very rooted in the land

“Marie stole slowly, flutteringly, along the path, like a white night-moth out of the fields. The years seemed to stretch before her like the land...always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning, the same pulling at the chain - until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released...When she reached the stile she sat down and waited. How ter...

Alexandra Bergson at a young age , has to take care of her family and farm, in Nebraska, with the untimely death of their father John, he wished his oldest child, ( and smartest ) to guide the poor immigrants from Sweden in the 1880's, everyone agrees at first, struggling on the harsh prairie, are also brothers Lou, Oscar and five year old Emil, her pet, the mother knows little about farming... An endless drought soon after begins , the Sun baking the soil , the crops withering for lack of rain,...

I read this book many times. Why? Its a beautiful book (and georgous stage play). This was the first professional-'Equity'- play our daughter was in (at the age of 9).I want to read another Willa Cather book soon. "My Antonia" was also wonderful.A book I haven't read yet ---and would like to is: "The Professor's House". Willa Cather is a beautiful writer!

Published in 1913, this novel brings the harsh Nebraska prairie to life.  To the ones who farm it, the sensible ones, the dreamers, and the ones who recognize the value of mending other people's fences.  A pure love and belief of the land, those who are content with their lot, and those who are unable to contemplate a lifetime of the backbreaking labor that is demanded.  How much easier it is to lose happiness than it is to find it.  Simple, full of life, loves, and regrets.

I just want to say that the last 15 pages of this book are for me worth 50 of the most important and significant books of this century...I don’t have much to say, except that the greatest grace that a person can live and experience today is surely forgiveness, knowing how to love, leaving the life of others free, even though it is not corresponding to our projects.Alexandra is a rigid woman, firm and integral in her thought and love... but has been able despite experiencing pain and tragedy, how...

"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman."I don't know why I haven't read this before -- it seems like the kind of novel I should have been assigned in 9th grade -- but I'm glad I read it as an adult because I wouldn't have appreciated it as much when I was younger. I am from the Midwest and my grandparents were farmers, and I loved Willa Cather's stories about what it was like for the pioneers in Nebraska. I liked Cather's spare writing style; she gives just the rig...

This was a lot like O Klahoma! but without those catchy songs. "O! what a Beautiful Morning" would have slotted right into O Pioneers! on page 14, 29, 47, 83 and 112. Right in there. There are a lot of beautiful mornings in these pages. Maybe in those days you said everything with an exclamation mark. “O breakfast!” “O horse!” “O my head!”.Or in my case “O how many pages are left… O no…”This was dull. Our lives are like the years, all made up of weather and crops and cows.Yeah, that’s about righ...

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐s for quality of writing and descriptions⭐ because it turned out to be a fricking romance novelAverages out to 3 stars(May classic of the month for 2019)

Once again, a second time, I was at the mercy of Willa Cather's writing, and closed this book with a feeling of accomplishment: as a reader as well as a human being.In my world, more than a century after this novel was written, we still battle nature on a daily basis and we are aware that nature will return the moment we leave this little piece of earth for a respite. With seed, roots and rain, the stories of ages of human history will be covered in an instant, wiped away as though we never walk...

Beginning with simplicity, innocence and hope, Willa Cather runs her pioneers through the ring of fire that is the hallmark of the pioneer's life and only some of them survive.Perhaps I've made that sound more exciting than O Pioneers! actually is. There are far too many dull scenes in this book for me to call it a perfect classic, but it is a solid addition to American western frontier literature. Writing from her experiences, Cather populated her novel with Scandinavian immigrants, gave them b...

This book gets high marks from the critics, and One of Ours won the Pulitzer Prize, but of all her prairie novels, My Ántoniais my favorite. But they are all well written, all very readable, all worth reading.

Rating: 3.75* of fiveThe Publisher Says: Set on the Nebraska prairie where Willa Cather (1873–1947) grew up, this powerful early novel tells the story of the young Alexandra Bergson, whose dying father leaves her in charge of the family and of the lands they have struggled to farm. In Alexandra's long flight to survive and succeed, O Pioneers! relates an important chapter in the history of the American frontier.Evoking the harsh grandeur of the prairie, this landmark of American fiction unfurls