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Great Plains Trilogy #1
O Pioneers!
The first novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is an ode to the American Midwest and the immigrants who transformed it
To the anger of her brothers, it is Alexandra who is entrusted to manage their family farm in the tough, hostile prairie of Hanover, Nebraska following the death of their father. As the years pass, Alexandra rises heroically to the challenge, finding strength in the savage beauty of the land even as loneliness and personal tragedies crowd in. A rapturous work of understated lyricism, Willa Cather's 1913 tale of a pioneer woman who tames the wild, hostile lands of the Nebraskan prairie is also the story of what it means to be American.
To the anger of her brothers, it is Alexandra who is entrusted to manage their family farm in the tough, hostile prairie of Hanover, Nebraska following the death of their father. As the years pass, Alexandra rises heroically to the challenge, finding strength in the savage beauty of the land even as loneliness and personal tragedies crowd in. A rapturous work of understated lyricism, Willa Cather's 1913 tale of a pioneer woman who tames the wild, hostile lands of the Nebraskan prairie is also the story of what it means to be American.
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1913
About the author
Willa Cather
1,068 books2,981 followersWilella Sibert Cather was born in Back Creek Valley (Gore), Virginia, in December 7, 1873.
She grew up in Virginia and Nebraska. She then attended the University of Nebraska, initially planning to become a physician, but after writing an article for the Nebraska State Journal, she became a regular contributor to this journal. Because of this, she changed her major and graduated with a bachelor's degree in English.
After graduation in 1894, she worked in Pittsburgh as writer for various publications and as a school teacher for approximately 13 years, thereafter moving to New York City for the remainder of her life.
Her novels on frontier life brought her to national recognition. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, 'One of Ours' (1922), set during World War I. She travelled widely and often spent summers in New Brunswick, Canada. In later life, she experienced much negative criticism for her conservative politics and became reclusive, burning some of her letters and personal papers, including her last manuscript.
She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943. In 1944, Cather received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, an award given once a decade for an author's total accomplishments.
She died of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of 73 in New York City.
She grew up in Virginia and Nebraska. She then attended the University of Nebraska, initially planning to become a physician, but after writing an article for the Nebraska State Journal, she became a regular contributor to this journal. Because of this, she changed her major and graduated with a bachelor's degree in English.
After graduation in 1894, she worked in Pittsburgh as writer for various publications and as a school teacher for approximately 13 years, thereafter moving to New York City for the remainder of her life.
Her novels on frontier life brought her to national recognition. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, 'One of Ours' (1922), set during World War I. She travelled widely and often spent summers in New Brunswick, Canada. In later life, she experienced much negative criticism for her conservative politics and became reclusive, burning some of her letters and personal papers, including her last manuscript.
She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943. In 1944, Cather received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, an award given once a decade for an author's total accomplishments.
She died of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of 73 in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 5,009 reviews
August 19, 2016
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 Spring
The novel opens with a poem contrasting the harsh landscape with the power of youth to trigger change, including:
“Evening and the flat land…
The toiling horses, the tired men…
Sullen fires of sunset, fading,
The eternal, unresponsive sky.
Against all this, Youth,
Flaming like the wild roses…
Flashing like a star out of the twilight...”
Part I – The Wild Land
At barely twenty, Alexandra Bergson takes over her late father’s land, aided by hard-working but risk-averse brothers Lou and Oscar (aged 17 and 19). She has big plans to try new things, buy more land, employ farmhands, and get little Emil (aged 5) educated.
Alexandra is the leading person, but the landscape is the main character. Everyone in The Divide is an outsider, identified by their heritage (Swedish, French, Bohemian etc), as they strive to survive and conquer the harsh and unfamiliar soil and climate, while battling blizzards, prairie dogs, snakes, cholera, and debt. Many cling to “the Old-World belief that land, in itself, is desirable. But this land was an enigma” and there is the constant fear that “men were too weak to make a mark here”. But Alexandra is a woman.
First impressions are conjured by short plain words: gray, anchored, haphazard, howling wind, frozen, straying, straggled, open plain, impermanence, tough prairie sod.... The simple, but carefully chosen language of landscape reminds me of Kent Haruf’s Colorado high plains (see my reviews of Plainsong and Eventide).
The vast, bleak, and beautiful place, whose capricious moods both give and take life, reminds me of Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s Iceland (see my reviews HERE).
Part II – Neighboring Fields
Sixteen years later and the writing style is the same, but the landscape is transformed: checker-board fields, white roads at right angles, telephone cables, steel windmills, gaily painted farmhouses (rather than being made of sod), and gilded weather vanes.
“The brown earth, with such a strong, clean smell, and such a power of growth and fertility in it” now “It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back.” Humans have won, Alexandra chief among them. “The land… had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right”.
Freed from the stress of basic survival, pleasure can sometimes be indulged: friendships and marriages formed, children born, the adventure of university. But it’s the tentative relationships that quietly dominate in the shadows, the ones that society can’t condone.
The soil of success can also nourish discord, greed and jealousy.
“People have to snatch happiness when they can… It’s always easier to lose than to find.” The second half is undoubtedly true, but the first half ignores the possible price paid by others.
Part III – Winter Memories
“The season in which Nature recuperates, in which she sinks to sleep between the fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring.” Just as the frozen ground hides and protects, those mourning loss, absence, and what cannot be feel comfort that deep down, “the secret of life was still safe, warm as the blood in one’s heart; and the spring would come again!”
Part IV – The White Mulberry Tree
“The sun was hanging low over the wheatfield. Long fingers of light reached through the apple branches as though a net; the orchard was riddled and shot with gold; light was the reality, the trees were merely interferences that reflected and refracted light.”
There’s an idyllic veneer (white mulberries: how succulent, beautiful, and pure - but they’re next to the cherries). However, many of the characters are hurting, longing, trying to suppress things, and there is a sense of possible doom.
“Always the same yearning, the same pulling 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.”
Part V – Alexandra
Thirteen pages of betrayal. Betrayal in the story, but I felt betrayed as a reader.
For the first four sections, I was in awe of Alexandra: intelligent, practical, principled, loyal, generous, and determined, but “armoured in calm” and with charm and persuasiveness. Somehow, Cather makes this admirable woman entirely believable and likeable.
Alexandra is never passive (nor even deferential), never aggressive, and not even passive-aggressive - except when a man makes an unwelcome compliment on her hair, to which “she stabbed him with a glance of Amazonian fierceness”. She just does the research, takes calculated risks, and firmly but gently demonstrates the best way to do things, getting her way, without pressuring anyone.
She is aspirational for her family, especially Emil and niece Molly, but loves her land more than any possessions. She is conventional enough to attend church regularly, and although “She liked plain things”, she bows to “the general conviction that the more useless and utterly unusable objects were, the greater their virtue as ornament.”. But she fiercely defends the rights of others to live, dress, and think differently, even to the detriment of her own relationships and reputation, most notably by taking in Ivar, a barefoot, Bible-loving, bird-loving, vegetarian, and amateur veterinarian who has visions.
In this final section, everything changes. I try not to judge an old book solely by my own times, but how Alexandra reacts, over several months, to the dramatic end of the previous section, doesn’t fit with how Cather had portrayed her thus far. To get to this ending, Alexandra should have been a different person all along; not radically different, but different.
BIG spoilers
I don't crave happy or even tidy endings. I've read books where I've been stunned in a positive way (Stoner, and Stefansson's Heaven and Hell triptych, and Toibin's Testament of Mary come to mind), and others where I've felt the last few pages unnecessary, and perhaps diluted the force of the main narrative (Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible). But this just jarred. It tainted the preceding sections. What would have been a 5* book only just scrapes 4*.
Quotes
No plot spoilers; they’re hidden for brevity.
Image of Nebraskan prairie:
https://thecalloftheland.files.wordpr...
The title of this novel is a nod to Walt Whitman’s poem, Pioneers! O Pioneers, published in Leaves of Grass in 1865 (Cather’s novel was published in 1913).
The final thirteen pages felt written by or about a different person, not the author and protagonist I thought I knew.
Prairie Spring
The novel opens with a poem contrasting the harsh landscape with the power of youth to trigger change, including:
“Evening and the flat land…
The toiling horses, the tired men…
Sullen fires of sunset, fading,
The eternal, unresponsive sky.
Against all this, Youth,
Flaming like the wild roses…
Flashing like a star out of the twilight...”
Part I – The Wild Land
At barely twenty, Alexandra Bergson takes over her late father’s land, aided by hard-working but risk-averse brothers Lou and Oscar (aged 17 and 19). She has big plans to try new things, buy more land, employ farmhands, and get little Emil (aged 5) educated.
Alexandra is the leading person, but the landscape is the main character. Everyone in The Divide is an outsider, identified by their heritage (Swedish, French, Bohemian etc), as they strive to survive and conquer the harsh and unfamiliar soil and climate, while battling blizzards, prairie dogs, snakes, cholera, and debt. Many cling to “the Old-World belief that land, in itself, is desirable. But this land was an enigma” and there is the constant fear that “men were too weak to make a mark here”. But Alexandra is a woman.
First impressions are conjured by short plain words: gray, anchored, haphazard, howling wind, frozen, straying, straggled, open plain, impermanence, tough prairie sod.... The simple, but carefully chosen language of landscape reminds me of Kent Haruf’s Colorado high plains (see my reviews of Plainsong and Eventide).
The vast, bleak, and beautiful place, whose capricious moods both give and take life, reminds me of Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s Iceland (see my reviews HERE).
Part II – Neighboring Fields
Sixteen years later and the writing style is the same, but the landscape is transformed: checker-board fields, white roads at right angles, telephone cables, steel windmills, gaily painted farmhouses (rather than being made of sod), and gilded weather vanes.
“The brown earth, with such a strong, clean smell, and such a power of growth and fertility in it” now “It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back.” Humans have won, Alexandra chief among them. “The land… had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right”.
Freed from the stress of basic survival, pleasure can sometimes be indulged: friendships and marriages formed, children born, the adventure of university. But it’s the tentative relationships that quietly dominate in the shadows, the ones that society can’t condone.
The soil of success can also nourish discord, greed and jealousy.
“People have to snatch happiness when they can… It’s always easier to lose than to find.” The second half is undoubtedly true, but the first half ignores the possible price paid by others.
Part III – Winter Memories
“The season in which Nature recuperates, in which she sinks to sleep between the fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring.” Just as the frozen ground hides and protects, those mourning loss, absence, and what cannot be feel comfort that deep down, “the secret of life was still safe, warm as the blood in one’s heart; and the spring would come again!”
Part IV – The White Mulberry Tree
“The sun was hanging low over the wheatfield. Long fingers of light reached through the apple branches as though a net; the orchard was riddled and shot with gold; light was the reality, the trees were merely interferences that reflected and refracted light.”
There’s an idyllic veneer (white mulberries: how succulent, beautiful, and pure - but they’re next to the cherries). However, many of the characters are hurting, longing, trying to suppress things, and there is a sense of possible doom.
“Always the same yearning, the same pulling 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.”
Part V – Alexandra
Thirteen pages of betrayal. Betrayal in the story, but I felt betrayed as a reader.
For the first four sections, I was in awe of Alexandra: intelligent, practical, principled, loyal, generous, and determined, but “armoured in calm” and with charm and persuasiveness. Somehow, Cather makes this admirable woman entirely believable and likeable.
Alexandra is never passive (nor even deferential), never aggressive, and not even passive-aggressive - except when a man makes an unwelcome compliment on her hair, to which “she stabbed him with a glance of Amazonian fierceness”. She just does the research, takes calculated risks, and firmly but gently demonstrates the best way to do things, getting her way, without pressuring anyone.
She is aspirational for her family, especially Emil and niece Molly, but loves her land more than any possessions. She is conventional enough to attend church regularly, and although “She liked plain things”, she bows to “the general conviction that the more useless and utterly unusable objects were, the greater their virtue as ornament.”. But she fiercely defends the rights of others to live, dress, and think differently, even to the detriment of her own relationships and reputation, most notably by taking in Ivar, a barefoot, Bible-loving, bird-loving, vegetarian, and amateur veterinarian who has visions.
In this final section, everything changes. I try not to judge an old book solely by my own times, but how Alexandra reacts, over several months, to the dramatic end of the previous section, doesn’t fit with how Cather had portrayed her thus far. To get to this ending, Alexandra should have been a different person all along; not radically different, but different.
BIG spoilers
I don't crave happy or even tidy endings. I've read books where I've been stunned in a positive way (Stoner, and Stefansson's Heaven and Hell triptych, and Toibin's Testament of Mary come to mind), and others where I've felt the last few pages unnecessary, and perhaps diluted the force of the main narrative (Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible). But this just jarred. It tainted the preceding sections. What would have been a 5* book only just scrapes 4*.
Quotes
No plot spoilers; they’re hidden for brevity.
Image of Nebraskan prairie:
https://thecalloftheland.files.wordpr...
The title of this novel is a nod to Walt Whitman’s poem, Pioneers! O Pioneers, published in Leaves of Grass in 1865 (Cather’s novel was published in 1913).
June 20, 2010
“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 terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives…”
- Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
“All the hapless silent lovers,
All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked,
All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying,
Pioneers! O pioneers!”
- Walt Whitman, Pioneers! O Pioneers!
Willa Cather's opening description of Nebraska in O Pioneers! is unlikely to find its way into the Cornhusker State's tourism bureau pamphlets. With a sharp particularity that is present throughout the novel, she describes the fictional town of Hanover as near to being blown away by a howling wind. The town itself consists of low drab buildings beneath a gray sky, clinging to a gray prairie. The Nebraska of O Pioneers! is hard, unforgiving, yet tempting; it is a land that is waiting to be tamed, though it will break many dreams before giving its reward.
Having lived in Nebraska many years, I can say one thing about this portrait: she is right about that wind.
Less important than windblown Hanover is the people who call it home. Among those are the Bergson family, in particular Alexandra and Emil, who are the two wildly-beating hearts of Cather’s prairie-set classic.
Alexandra is the beloved daughter of John Bergson, a failed farmer who is dying as the novel begins. Unlike My Antonia, where the central female character is as elusive as a breeze, Alexandra holds center stage. She is tough-minded, gutsy, and beautifully described by Cather, who has a way of making her characters real, in just a few lines:
When John Bergson passes away, he leaves the homestead in Alexandra’s charge, which proves to be a good choice. Betting everything on the land – and herself – Alexandra proves herself as able as anyone.
From there, O Pioneers! takes on the form of a family epic, though at just over three-hundred pages, it is an efficient saga. To facilitate matters, O Pioneers! is divided into five parts, often with some big chronological leaps involved, as the decades slip away.
Without delving too much into plot points, it suffices to say that Cather’s story coalesces around two different love stories.
One belongs to Alexandra, who begins the novel as a sixteen year-old, and soon finds herself married to her farm and looking out for Emil. The man who catches her eye is Carl Linstrum, a sensitive soul who drifts in and out of Alexandra’s life, which makes him a bit tough to define. Many of the book’s grace notes, however, come from these two talking to each other at different stages in their lives:
The second love story is Emil's. He is the youngest of the Bergson brood, a golden child of sorts, charismatic and a dreamer. He goes to college, to Omaha, to Mexico, all the time nurturing his love for Marie.
Unfortunately, for Emil, the beautiful, vibrant Marie is married to a fellow named Frank Shabata. Frank, a former dandy, has made it his goal in life to make Marie suffer. The lovelessness of this situation provides Emil with a dangerous sliver of hope.
I won’t say more, because despite a bit of meandering, and despite the temporal leaps, O Pioneers! is definitely going somewhere, and it has some genuine surprises along the way. For me, at least, this was one of those rare classics whose ending has not been widely trumpeted, discussed, filmed, or parodied. Unless, of course, you count the 1992 television movie of the week starring Jessica Lange, David Strathairn, Anne Heche, and Heather Graham. It is online – in dubious quality – if you care to search for it.
Even with its twists, the plot is not really the thing. For me, the calling card of O Pioneers! is the prose. Cather is a wonderful writer, whether she is tracing the outlines of a person’s character, creating dialogue between two lovers, or simply showing us the land:
Atmosphere and sense of place are important to me when I read fiction. I like the sensation of being immersed in different worlds. Cather accomplishes this, even though that world happens to be Nebraska.
O Pioneers! is often packaged together with My Antonia and The Song of the Lark as the so-called “Great Plains Trilogy.” This is a thematic linking, not a genuine series connected by plot and character. Having read the first two books, it’s hard to say which one I like more. Both have the ability to hit you with an elemental force. Both use words to paint images that shimmer before your eyes.
What stands out with O Pioneers! is the passion it contains, and its depiction of how that passion changes as we age. There are scenes of young love that marvelously capture the raging emotional wildfire, that temporary madness when nothing else seems to have worth. And there are scenes of a different, more refined kind of love, hardened a bit by the pragmatic realities of accumulated years. “People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world,” Alexandra observes. It is a good lesson, a simple lesson, and – at times – a hard one to remember.
- Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
“All the hapless silent lovers,
All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked,
All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying,
Pioneers! O pioneers!”
- Walt Whitman, Pioneers! O Pioneers!
Willa Cather's opening description of Nebraska in O Pioneers! is unlikely to find its way into the Cornhusker State's tourism bureau pamphlets. With a sharp particularity that is present throughout the novel, she describes the fictional town of Hanover as near to being blown away by a howling wind. The town itself consists of low drab buildings beneath a gray sky, clinging to a gray prairie. The Nebraska of O Pioneers! is hard, unforgiving, yet tempting; it is a land that is waiting to be tamed, though it will break many dreams before giving its reward.
Having lived in Nebraska many years, I can say one thing about this portrait: she is right about that wind.
Less important than windblown Hanover is the people who call it home. Among those are the Bergson family, in particular Alexandra and Emil, who are the two wildly-beating hearts of Cather’s prairie-set classic.
Alexandra is the beloved daughter of John Bergson, a failed farmer who is dying as the novel begins. Unlike My Antonia, where the central female character is as elusive as a breeze, Alexandra holds center stage. She is tough-minded, gutsy, and beautifully described by Cather, who has a way of making her characters real, in just a few lines:
There was about Alexandra something of the impervious calm of the fatalist, always disconcerting to very young people, who cannot feel that the heart lives at all unless it is still at the mercy of storms; unless its strings can scream to the touch of pain.
When John Bergson passes away, he leaves the homestead in Alexandra’s charge, which proves to be a good choice. Betting everything on the land – and herself – Alexandra proves herself as able as anyone.
From there, O Pioneers! takes on the form of a family epic, though at just over three-hundred pages, it is an efficient saga. To facilitate matters, O Pioneers! is divided into five parts, often with some big chronological leaps involved, as the decades slip away.
Without delving too much into plot points, it suffices to say that Cather’s story coalesces around two different love stories.
One belongs to Alexandra, who begins the novel as a sixteen year-old, and soon finds herself married to her farm and looking out for Emil. The man who catches her eye is Carl Linstrum, a sensitive soul who drifts in and out of Alexandra’s life, which makes him a bit tough to define. Many of the book’s grace notes, however, come from these two talking to each other at different stages in their lives:
“Yes, sometimes… I think about father and mother and those who are gone; so many of our old neighbors.” Alexandra paused and looked up thoughtfully at the stars. “We can remember the graveyard when it was wild prairie, Carl, and now – ”
“And now the old story has begun to write itself over there,” Carl said softly. “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 notes over for thousands of years…”
The second love story is Emil's. He is the youngest of the Bergson brood, a golden child of sorts, charismatic and a dreamer. He goes to college, to Omaha, to Mexico, all the time nurturing his love for Marie.
Unfortunately, for Emil, the beautiful, vibrant Marie is married to a fellow named Frank Shabata. Frank, a former dandy, has made it his goal in life to make Marie suffer. The lovelessness of this situation provides Emil with a dangerous sliver of hope.
I won’t say more, because despite a bit of meandering, and despite the temporal leaps, O Pioneers! is definitely going somewhere, and it has some genuine surprises along the way. For me, at least, this was one of those rare classics whose ending has not been widely trumpeted, discussed, filmed, or parodied. Unless, of course, you count the 1992 television movie of the week starring Jessica Lange, David Strathairn, Anne Heche, and Heather Graham. It is online – in dubious quality – if you care to search for it.
Even with its twists, the plot is not really the thing. For me, the calling card of O Pioneers! is the prose. Cather is a wonderful writer, whether she is tracing the outlines of a person’s character, creating dialogue between two lovers, or simply showing us the land:
Alexandra rose and looked about. A golden afterglow throbbed in the west, but the country already looked empty and mournful. A dark moving mass came over the western hill, the Lee boy was bringing in the herd from the other half-section. Emil ran from the windmill to open the corral gate. From the log house, on the little rise across the draw, the smoke was curling. The cattle lowed and bellowed. In the sky the pale half-moon was slowly silvering.
Atmosphere and sense of place are important to me when I read fiction. I like the sensation of being immersed in different worlds. Cather accomplishes this, even though that world happens to be Nebraska.
O Pioneers! is often packaged together with My Antonia and The Song of the Lark as the so-called “Great Plains Trilogy.” This is a thematic linking, not a genuine series connected by plot and character. Having read the first two books, it’s hard to say which one I like more. Both have the ability to hit you with an elemental force. Both use words to paint images that shimmer before your eyes.
What stands out with O Pioneers! is the passion it contains, and its depiction of how that passion changes as we age. There are scenes of young love that marvelously capture the raging emotional wildfire, that temporary madness when nothing else seems to have worth. And there are scenes of a different, more refined kind of love, hardened a bit by the pragmatic realities of accumulated years. “People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world,” Alexandra observes. It is a good lesson, a simple lesson, and – at times – a hard one to remember.
September 20, 2014
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, year after year, fail, many farmers give up and leave for the cities, but the Bergson's endure, because of the wise and strong leadership that Alexandra brings ( the people around there, recognize that fact ). The little town of Hanover, a short distance away takes care of the needs of the local farmers, she Alexandra often meets her only friend Carl Linstrum there, from a neighboring farm, still he doesn't have a clue what to do in life, moody, always daydreaming, unsure, the obvious is in front of his eyes but he cannot focus... 16 years have passed , the land becomes prosperous, prices are skyrocketing, farmers becoming well off, some even rich, the old evil days long forgotten, the Bergson family farm has been divided between Alexandra, Lou, the intelligent brother and Oscar, the harder worker, thus makes more money to the chagrin of Lou, politics is his passion, not farming . The aimless Carl has left, and lonely Alexandra has many Swedish female servants to take care of the new house, and enjoys their company, no log cabin like the old one, even old Crazy lvar works for her, he has occasional spells, nothing to worry about ( as does Lou and Oscar), a man who loves animals better than he does humans, neglected his farm and loses it. Emil has graduated from the University of Nebraska, at Lincoln, he is thinking about becoming a lawyer, a profession that doesn't appeal to him ( or anybody else), he secretly falls in love with a married woman, effervescent Marie Shabata, her brooding, jealous husband Frank treats her badly, no love between the two has existed for years, something will happen soon, that will cause a scandal, so the naive Emil goes to Mexico City. To forget his troubles, have fun and adventures, meet new exciting people, a different society far away from Nebraska, however you can't escape your destiny. Beneath the surface there is a smothering darkness, a black cloud, a cruel spirit, a thing that can't be touched or smelled, it scares yet remains hidden, ready to strike, they all know this truth, nothing will stop, the coming of that ominous force... the cold wind stirs.
July 7, 2008
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 Landon crying into a butter churn, and here you are, everything that is wonderful about humans. Still, I never know whether to recommend that other people read this book, or whether it is better to just keep it to myself. As Alexandra says, we are not all made alike, and maybe what is beauty and revelation to me is Michael Landon crying into a butter churn to you.
It’s so easy to say why I hate writing and difficult to say why I love it. I want to compare Cather to Hemingway because of how steady and careful their writing is, because of how speculation about their lives cheapens conversations about their stories, but no. I want to say Cather writes what is in my soul, but that’s not right either. What she writes is as much her own world as it is my reality, but that doesn’t make her wisdom easy or her power arrogant. She is not looking for my approval, but she is looking outside herself for some kind of truth.
At a particularly conflicted time in my life, I went to a club with some friends and I saw a girl dancing like I have never seen anyone dance in my life. She had cleared out as space for herself to the side of the stage, and it was like every part of her body was electric. It was not only beautiful, it was also full of life. Where I didn’t know which way to turn, this girl was in the Place, doing the Thing. Reading O Pioneers! is like watching that girl. Everything is alive in this book.
But, again, I’m struck by the feeling that it may not be alive to you as it is to me. I’ll give you a few descriptions as objectively as I can, and you can judge for yourself. It is about contrasts: country and city, speed and slowness, youth and age, passion and steadiness, inspiration and hard work, deprivation and entitlement. It is operatic. It is kooky at times and kind, but not funny. It is understated and even-handed. It is written by a woman. It is about women and men, who are all sometimes as passionate as people are, and other times as wise as people should be. It is specific, but not petty. There are awkward parts (specifically book 2, chapter 9, though I even think that scene is beautiful).
It’s difficult to talk about this book without spoiling it, and I think a spoiler would really spoil the story. So, I’ll just say one last thing that I hope won’t be a spoiler, but might, so be warned. People get angry with authors who won’t let their characters die and see it as a sign of accomplished writing to kill a character. I think, because of that, I see a lot of bad storytelling mistaken for good storytelling if the author tortures or kills the characters. I really hate when people think character abuse is maturity. At the same time, though, I think there is something right about trusting an author more if the author allows unhappiness into the story. Authors are writing to an audience, and I think they should be writing to entertain, so there is value to me in making stories better than life. At the same time, there is truth in sadness, and if a writer can’t look at sadness, she has sacrificed truth to entertainment. Cather balances truth and entertainment in a way that is completely devastating. She loves her characters, and lets every one of them grow as humans grow, with human joys and human tragedies. It is painful and beautiful to watch.
I almost want to read this book again right away, but too much wisdom in one month can’t be good for my health. I’ll take a little break first and watch some reality TV to balance out my wisdom intake. Just, you know, for my health.
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 Landon crying into a butter churn, and here you are, everything that is wonderful about humans. Still, I never know whether to recommend that other people read this book, or whether it is better to just keep it to myself. As Alexandra says, we are not all made alike, and maybe what is beauty and revelation to me is Michael Landon crying into a butter churn to you.
It’s so easy to say why I hate writing and difficult to say why I love it. I want to compare Cather to Hemingway because of how steady and careful their writing is, because of how speculation about their lives cheapens conversations about their stories, but no. I want to say Cather writes what is in my soul, but that’s not right either. What she writes is as much her own world as it is my reality, but that doesn’t make her wisdom easy or her power arrogant. She is not looking for my approval, but she is looking outside herself for some kind of truth.
At a particularly conflicted time in my life, I went to a club with some friends and I saw a girl dancing like I have never seen anyone dance in my life. She had cleared out as space for herself to the side of the stage, and it was like every part of her body was electric. It was not only beautiful, it was also full of life. Where I didn’t know which way to turn, this girl was in the Place, doing the Thing. Reading O Pioneers! is like watching that girl. Everything is alive in this book.
But, again, I’m struck by the feeling that it may not be alive to you as it is to me. I’ll give you a few descriptions as objectively as I can, and you can judge for yourself. It is about contrasts: country and city, speed and slowness, youth and age, passion and steadiness, inspiration and hard work, deprivation and entitlement. It is operatic. It is kooky at times and kind, but not funny. It is understated and even-handed. It is written by a woman. It is about women and men, who are all sometimes as passionate as people are, and other times as wise as people should be. It is specific, but not petty. There are awkward parts (specifically book 2, chapter 9, though I even think that scene is beautiful).
It’s difficult to talk about this book without spoiling it, and I think a spoiler would really spoil the story. So, I’ll just say one last thing that I hope won’t be a spoiler, but might, so be warned. People get angry with authors who won’t let their characters die and see it as a sign of accomplished writing to kill a character. I think, because of that, I see a lot of bad storytelling mistaken for good storytelling if the author tortures or kills the characters. I really hate when people think character abuse is maturity. At the same time, though, I think there is something right about trusting an author more if the author allows unhappiness into the story. Authors are writing to an audience, and I think they should be writing to entertain, so there is value to me in making stories better than life. At the same time, there is truth in sadness, and if a writer can’t look at sadness, she has sacrificed truth to entertainment. Cather balances truth and entertainment in a way that is completely devastating. She loves her characters, and lets every one of them grow as humans grow, with human joys and human tragedies. It is painful and beautiful to watch.
I almost want to read this book again right away, but too much wisdom in one month can’t be good for my health. I’ll take a little break first and watch some reality TV to balance out my wisdom intake. Just, you know, for my health.
August 11, 2017
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 the ground to plant seeds to feed themselves and their animals, if they have any.
And through this novel, we are also introduced to people who have a vision broader than just survival. A vision that eventually bears fruit as the earth begins to give back rather than just take. And so the cycle of life begins where people and animals give to the earth and the earth produces for the people and animals, gradually rewarding each other for mutual benefit.
This is part of the story in this book, but only a part. Wherever there are human beings, they bring their stories and they create and re-create their stories. As with all human stories over time, there is great joy accompanied by great sorrow, and tragedy sits next to both temptation and triumph.
What I appreciate most deeply in reading Willa Cather’s writing is the poetic flow that feels as natural as the wind rustling through a field of wheat. While I paused many times to allow her words to sink in as deeply as possible, the narrative was only enhanced by those reflective moments.
This is the first part of Willa Cather’s Great Plains Trilogy and I look forward to reading the next one as soon as possible.
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 the ground to plant seeds to feed themselves and their animals, if they have any.
And through this novel, we are also introduced to people who have a vision broader than just survival. A vision that eventually bears fruit as the earth begins to give back rather than just take. And so the cycle of life begins where people and animals give to the earth and the earth produces for the people and animals, gradually rewarding each other for mutual benefit.
This is part of the story in this book, but only a part. Wherever there are human beings, they bring their stories and they create and re-create their stories. As with all human stories over time, there is great joy accompanied by great sorrow, and tragedy sits next to both temptation and triumph.
What I appreciate most deeply in reading Willa Cather’s writing is the poetic flow that feels as natural as the wind rustling through a field of wheat. While I paused many times to allow her words to sink in as deeply as possible, the narrative was only enhanced by those reflective moments.
This is the first part of Willa Cather’s Great Plains Trilogy and I look forward to reading the next one as soon as possible.
September 21, 2019
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.
December 5, 2012
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!
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!
August 22, 2023
With a title of O, Pioneers! I anticipated a prairie setting with people and place a major component of the story, but it's more character and vignette oriented rather than prairie-life focused. A disappointment for me, as I really enjoy books set in homesteading times and watching characters succeed through their own hard work and determination.
Unfortunately, as with many classics, this was not a story I particularly enjoyed. I always feel like classics are classics for a reason, yet that reason seems to be out of reach for this pleasure reader. O, Pioneers! is light on action and a bit dull at times, which only intensifies the idea that I should be taking away something of literary merit but it's sure hard to know precisely what that is.
The takeaway for me is that being different is okay. It's not a bad thing to see things from a different perspective, or to have a different personality. In fact, a different perspective can often lead to greater success and happiness. Live life on your own terms and not by a prescribed notion that someone else has set out. Characters like Alexandra, Carl, Emil, Marie, and even Frank show conservative and progressive, positive and negative thinking, and how our viewpoints and thought processes lead us down alternate courses than we may have first imagined, or even now imagine for ourselves.
We should believe in ourself and others, and strive to make something of ourself and be someone to admire. There's even a hint of the thought that you make your own destiny, good and bad. So choose to pursue that which you desire so that you don't end up with that which you don't. And hopefully you've figured out what you want before you've wandered too far down the wrong course.
Now is any of that what the author intended for me to realize? I don't know. All I can do is share what I got out of the writing and hope that my thoughts can be understood and confirmed by other readers.
A monochrome-feeling read that in spite of its self-confidence message left me feeling sedate and melancholic.
Unfortunately, as with many classics, this was not a story I particularly enjoyed. I always feel like classics are classics for a reason, yet that reason seems to be out of reach for this pleasure reader. O, Pioneers! is light on action and a bit dull at times, which only intensifies the idea that I should be taking away something of literary merit but it's sure hard to know precisely what that is.
The takeaway for me is that being different is okay. It's not a bad thing to see things from a different perspective, or to have a different personality. In fact, a different perspective can often lead to greater success and happiness. Live life on your own terms and not by a prescribed notion that someone else has set out. Characters like Alexandra, Carl, Emil, Marie, and even Frank show conservative and progressive, positive and negative thinking, and how our viewpoints and thought processes lead us down alternate courses than we may have first imagined, or even now imagine for ourselves.
We should believe in ourself and others, and strive to make something of ourself and be someone to admire. There's even a hint of the thought that you make your own destiny, good and bad. So choose to pursue that which you desire so that you don't end up with that which you don't. And hopefully you've figured out what you want before you've wandered too far down the wrong course.
Now is any of that what the author intended for me to realize? I don't know. All I can do is share what I got out of the writing and hope that my thoughts can be understood and confirmed by other readers.
A monochrome-feeling read that in spite of its self-confidence message left me feeling sedate and melancholic.
February 26, 2026
This has to be one of the most beautiful books ever written. Cather has no peer when she writes about Nebraska and the Great Plains. This novel has a quiet grace that was a balm to my spirit.
July 15, 2012
"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 right amount of description and action, and then moves on to the next chapter. In this way we get a complete picture of the whole life of Alexandra Bergson without the story ever dragging.
"His sister was a tall, strong girl, and she walked rapidly and resolutely, as if she knew exactly where she was going and what she was going to do next."
Alexandra is such a strong character -- she was as defiant as the land she was trying to tame. At one point I got so angry when some men tried to bully her that I slammed the book shut in frustration. My break didn't last long, and I should have known that Alexandra would get her way in the end.
"We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it -- for a little while."
I think I reacted so strongly to "O Pioneers!" because it reminded me of the stories my grandmother would tell about running a farm during the Depression. It is easy to romanticize this time period and to forget the backbreaking work that went into taming the land to grow crops and support a family. I would recommend this book to anyone who has an appreciation for the land or who likes strong female characters.
Update September 2013: I am rereading the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, which are about another pioneering American family, and it reminded me of how much I loved this Willa Cather novel. I have thought about "O Pioneers" many times since I read it a year ago -- I would put it on a list of Books To Read To Understand America. Perhaps this is my background in sociology talking, but I like stories that show how a country was formed. Aside from the politics and the war, you still need families who are doing the hard work to build homes and grow food and create new towns. You can't have a nation without everyday people. Here's to all the pioneers of the world!
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 right amount of description and action, and then moves on to the next chapter. In this way we get a complete picture of the whole life of Alexandra Bergson without the story ever dragging.
"His sister was a tall, strong girl, and she walked rapidly and resolutely, as if she knew exactly where she was going and what she was going to do next."
Alexandra is such a strong character -- she was as defiant as the land she was trying to tame. At one point I got so angry when some men tried to bully her that I slammed the book shut in frustration. My break didn't last long, and I should have known that Alexandra would get her way in the end.
"We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it -- for a little while."
I think I reacted so strongly to "O Pioneers!" because it reminded me of the stories my grandmother would tell about running a farm during the Depression. It is easy to romanticize this time period and to forget the backbreaking work that went into taming the land to grow crops and support a family. I would recommend this book to anyone who has an appreciation for the land or who likes strong female characters.
Update September 2013: I am rereading the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, which are about another pioneering American family, and it reminded me of how much I loved this Willa Cather novel. I have thought about "O Pioneers" many times since I read it a year ago -- I would put it on a list of Books To Read To Understand America. Perhaps this is my background in sociology talking, but I like stories that show how a country was formed. Aside from the politics and the war, you still need families who are doing the hard work to build homes and grow food and create new towns. You can't have a nation without everyday people. Here's to all the pioneers of the world!
May 15, 2019
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐s for quality of writing and descriptions
⭐ because it turned out to be a fricking romance novel
Averages out to 3 stars
(May classic of the month for 2019)
⭐ because it turned out to be a fricking romance novel
Averages out to 3 stars
(May classic of the month for 2019)
May 3, 2020
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 right. In this novel there was one pretty good argument and one evil deed. But Willa, darling, it wasn’t enough. All this waffling about larkspur, hoarhound, foxtail, apricots and alfalfa. It’s like a catalogue at times or maybe a press release from the Nebraskan Chamber of Rural Commerce.
Okay, I did find one slightly saucy moment, but I don’t think it was intentional :
He thrust his hand into the pocket of his velvet trousers and brought out a handful of uncut turquoises, as big as marbles. Leaning over the table he dropped them into her lap. “There, will those do? Be careful, don't let any one see them. Now, I suppose you want me to go away and let you play with them?”
Marie was gazing in rapture at the soft blue color of the stones. “Oh, Emil! Is everything down there beautiful like these? ”
It’s possible she’s referring here to Mexico, where he’s just come from, rather than his trousers, but I think it’s ambiguous.
This novel is worthy. If it could, this novel would sell slab cake at a church bring-and-buy sale in aid of blind donkeys.
I don’t want to put the boot into Willa Cather too much, but if she calls round here again, give her a fiver and tell her I’m out.
A farm
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 right. In this novel there was one pretty good argument and one evil deed. But Willa, darling, it wasn’t enough. All this waffling about larkspur, hoarhound, foxtail, apricots and alfalfa. It’s like a catalogue at times or maybe a press release from the Nebraskan Chamber of Rural Commerce.
Okay, I did find one slightly saucy moment, but I don’t think it was intentional :
He thrust his hand into the pocket of his velvet trousers and brought out a handful of uncut turquoises, as big as marbles. Leaning over the table he dropped them into her lap. “There, will those do? Be careful, don't let any one see them. Now, I suppose you want me to go away and let you play with them?”
Marie was gazing in rapture at the soft blue color of the stones. “Oh, Emil! Is everything down there beautiful like these? ”
It’s possible she’s referring here to Mexico, where he’s just come from, rather than his trousers, but I think it’s ambiguous.
This novel is worthy. If it could, this novel would sell slab cake at a church bring-and-buy sale in aid of blind donkeys.
I don’t want to put the boot into Willa Cather too much, but if she calls round here again, give her a fiver and tell her I’m out.
A farm
December 2, 2025
This book was much shorter than I expected.
I expected beautiful clear prose and I found it. She surprised and impressed me with thought provoking observations about character, and about the land.
I expected beautiful clear prose and I found it. She surprised and impressed me with thought provoking observations about character, and about the land.
January 3, 2016
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 walked these paths a few million times through the slow passing of time.
Willa Cather gloriously painted the lives of pioneers in the unforgiving virginal wilderness at the turn of the 20th century, somewhere between 1883 and 1890, by describing the toughness and resilience of a group of immigrants in surviving the harshness of life on the prairies of Nebraska. The Bergsons children and their neighbors established a strong community through stubborn pride and dreams. It was their dreams, after all, that kept hope alive and celebrated the good times when it finally arrived. However, tragic love, diverse opinions, and hard manual labor drove those who preferred to stay behind, when the less experienced farmers were forced to leave.
Alexandra Bergson instinctively took the road less traveled, the one on which love took a second place, and meticulous learning challenged old ideas, and the less brave combatants against nature preferred to leave. She compassionately took care of neighbors, family and friends, by making choices that left herself devoid of love and allowed loneliness to become her a life companion. The ones who benefited the most appreciated her the least, but her promise, as well as understanding of her father's insight into the land and its possibilities, made her stick to her dreams and decisions.
The most important theme in the novel starts out in the beginning of the book, in the little town Hanover, Nebraska, in the bitterly cold winter, when Alexandra's little brother Emil's little kitten got chased up a telephone pole by stray dogs. He is waiting for her at the store while she is at the doctor's office. Carl Linstrum, a neighbor, arrives to rescue the little kitten on Alexandra's request for help. In the store where they try to warm up again, they meet the exotic Bohemian little girl Marie Tovesky who, with her sunny disposition, brown curly hair like a brunette doll's, her coaxing little red mouth, and round, yellow -brown eyes, with their golden glints like the Colorado mineral called tiger-eye, attracts men like flies even as a toddler.
The plot centers around the strong bonds of friendships, which pushes love aside for most of the book, yet cannot manage to deny this strong attraction between humans in the best and worst of ways. Two love stories, with two different endings, snake through the tale. Two relationships are tested by different rules. Perseverance nestles itself in different situations leaving the people involved exhausted or dead.
This book is so rich in emotional ironies, that I sat back afterwards and wondered why it was banned numerous times by the American Library Society. The kaleidoscope of human activities, driven by strong emotional intensity portrayed people in all their splendor. What part of this masterful text of human nature in all its intricate ways insulted some readers enough to have it banned?
The major focus, in my humble opinion, is the relationship between the different role players and their land.
This was a magnificent read. The prose lends itself to numerous memorial quotes. Willa Cather knew how to sell this part of the Divide to her readers with her poetic descriptions of the land and the people who conquered it.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
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 walked these paths a few million times through the slow passing of time.
Willa Cather gloriously painted the lives of pioneers in the unforgiving virginal wilderness at the turn of the 20th century, somewhere between 1883 and 1890, by describing the toughness and resilience of a group of immigrants in surviving the harshness of life on the prairies of Nebraska. The Bergsons children and their neighbors established a strong community through stubborn pride and dreams. It was their dreams, after all, that kept hope alive and celebrated the good times when it finally arrived. However, tragic love, diverse opinions, and hard manual labor drove those who preferred to stay behind, when the less experienced farmers were forced to leave.
Alexandra Bergson instinctively took the road less traveled, the one on which love took a second place, and meticulous learning challenged old ideas, and the less brave combatants against nature preferred to leave. She compassionately took care of neighbors, family and friends, by making choices that left herself devoid of love and allowed loneliness to become her a life companion. The ones who benefited the most appreciated her the least, but her promise, as well as understanding of her father's insight into the land and its possibilities, made her stick to her dreams and decisions.
The most important theme in the novel starts out in the beginning of the book, in the little town Hanover, Nebraska, in the bitterly cold winter, when Alexandra's little brother Emil's little kitten got chased up a telephone pole by stray dogs. He is waiting for her at the store while she is at the doctor's office. Carl Linstrum, a neighbor, arrives to rescue the little kitten on Alexandra's request for help. In the store where they try to warm up again, they meet the exotic Bohemian little girl Marie Tovesky who, with her sunny disposition, brown curly hair like a brunette doll's, her coaxing little red mouth, and round, yellow -brown eyes, with their golden glints like the Colorado mineral called tiger-eye, attracts men like flies even as a toddler.
The plot centers around the strong bonds of friendships, which pushes love aside for most of the book, yet cannot manage to deny this strong attraction between humans in the best and worst of ways. Two love stories, with two different endings, snake through the tale. Two relationships are tested by different rules. Perseverance nestles itself in different situations leaving the people involved exhausted or dead.
This book is so rich in emotional ironies, that I sat back afterwards and wondered why it was banned numerous times by the American Library Society. The kaleidoscope of human activities, driven by strong emotional intensity portrayed people in all their splendor. What part of this masterful text of human nature in all its intricate ways insulted some readers enough to have it banned?
“And now the old story has begun to write itself over there," said Carl softly. "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 for thousands of years.”Since love does not form the center of the plot, although many readers probably wanted it to do so, it does play out in the hearts of lonely, often desperate people. It becomes a secondary, underlying force in the book.
The major focus, in my humble opinion, is the relationship between the different role players and their land.
Alexandra: "The land belongs to the future, Carl; that's the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk's plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it--for a little while."Love becomes the third member of the marriage between humans and nature, resulting in an overcrowding of the relationship. Tears of joy and sorrow follows, as can be expected.
This was a magnificent read. The prose lends itself to numerous memorial quotes. Willa Cather knew how to sell this part of the Divide to her readers with her poetic descriptions of the land and the people who conquered it.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
February 14, 2017
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 backbones and leathery hides, and set them upon the fields of Nebraska. Their characters bloomed into an organic array of flowers, weeds, fruit, and prickly briars. What she sacrifices in the way of drama and action, she more than compensates in personality and the study of human behavior.
The central figure is a strong-willed and whip-smart young woman, who grows into a successful lady of the land. Our heroine is also good-natured, well-loved and kindly even to killers. If it weren't for the slightest of faults, her named could be Mary Jane. However, she is too real to be thought of as some caricature of saintliness.
Cather's My Antonia outshines this novel in its stark-yet-evocative descriptions of immigrant life on the prairie, but this is a damn fine book and worthy of the accolades it has received.
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 backbones and leathery hides, and set them upon the fields of Nebraska. Their characters bloomed into an organic array of flowers, weeds, fruit, and prickly briars. What she sacrifices in the way of drama and action, she more than compensates in personality and the study of human behavior.
The central figure is a strong-willed and whip-smart young woman, who grows into a successful lady of the land. Our heroine is also good-natured, well-loved and kindly even to killers. If it weren't for the slightest of faults, her named could be Mary Jane. However, she is too real to be thought of as some caricature of saintliness.
Cather's My Antonia outshines this novel in its stark-yet-evocative descriptions of immigrant life on the prairie, but this is a damn fine book and worthy of the accolades it has received.
December 11, 2013
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.
December 16, 2015
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 up to become a fearless business owner and woman of the land. Though she finds her best expression within the soil (in so many orchards and cornfields she brings to life), she is also intrigued by the world beyond her country home.
We grow hard and heavy here. We don't move lightly and easily as you do, and our minds get stiff. If the world were no wider than my cornfields, if there were not something beside this, I would n't feel that it was much worth while to work.
In Cather's The Professor's House, Professor Godfrey was just as distraught and unsatisfied as John Bergson, the opening 'voice' of this novel and the dying father of the family; both men relied heavily upon the heiresses of their family. Getting to know Alexandra brings back memories of Thea in Song of the Larks, except that unlike Thea who leaves to become a consumed and indifferent artist, Alexandra finds purpose at home, alongside jealous brothers who refuse to compliment her on her successful endeavors, yet still want to share in the "family's" wealth.
Alexandra makes her father a promise to keep the land that he'd struggled with unsuccessfully, for he believed in her mental girth. She takes a plot of unsuccessful land and turns it into a farming empire, buying a few farms while the price is low, and extending her property. She doesn't know much about love or companionship, and expressive thinking isn't her strong suit so I never got too close to the beat of her thought, but she feels the land in her very waking breath, and through her I saw beauty in toiling the soil:
The air and the earth are curiously mated and intermingled, as if the one were the breath of the other. You feel in the atmosphere the same tonic, puissant quality that is in the tilth, the same strength and resoluteness.
Willa Cather writes about the common lives of farmers, and yet she gracefully paints beautifully serene portraits of the countryside which governs each life, the country which drives the small town drama some characters endure. Her heroines are free thinkers influenced by the liberties of the wild land. She writes of the brown earth, of bitter winters, of flower-laden Springs, and of the Divide: houses tucked low into the ground and made of sod. Her female characters are strong-minded, rough-handed, and hard-working - it's rare that she spends time discussing beauty or attire. Marriage appears in between dialogue, as an afterthought. Work, purpose, artistry, or career, takes precedence with the females of her novels, and yet you don't notice this until you really take a minute to consider it, because of how subtly she infuses this within plot - since Cather disagreed with the feministic approach of some of her female peers, this is not surprising.
This was her second novel, her first, Alexander's Bridge, I have yet to read, and I'm not sure which Cather book I'll try next year. In each of her novels I've read, I've found that there is something intentionally different about the character positioning. One would say that this is the case with all writers who have composed quite a few novels, but there is something affecting about these similar-minded, similarly-situated, yet opposing characters that makes me interested in exploring these books again. In any case, it's not often that you see such a profound defense of the American midlands through aptly descriptive and moving prose.
September 28, 2015
Rating: 3.75* of five
The 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 a saga of love, greed, murder, failed dreams, and hard-won triumph. In the fateful interaction of her characters, Willa Cather compares with keen insight the experiences of Swedish, French, and Bohemian immigrants in the United States. And in her absorbing narrative, she displays the virtuoso storytelling skills that have made her one of the most admired masters of the American novel.
My Review: Simple, unadorned prose gets very wearing when it's also missing some basic character-building. In 122pp, it's not possible to do a Proustian job of lovingly explaining why people are who they are. But [The Picture of Dorian Gray], also a shortie, has the most gorgeously subtle character-building; [Mrs. Dalloway] is another example; so one concludes that Cather just wasn't interested in Lou or Oscar or the French neighbors.
As a moment in time, the book is invaluable. A concise slice of the life led by the crazy dreamers who decided the Old Country was no longer enough for them and their kids, packed what they could afford to carry, and vamoosed for the New World.
There is a private society that's trying to get together a colony of people with all the talents necessary to keep themselves alive on Mars. It's a one-way ticket...just like the pioneers of old.
How I wish I was young and healthy. I'd be on that rocket in a heartbeat.
The 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 a saga of love, greed, murder, failed dreams, and hard-won triumph. In the fateful interaction of her characters, Willa Cather compares with keen insight the experiences of Swedish, French, and Bohemian immigrants in the United States. And in her absorbing narrative, she displays the virtuoso storytelling skills that have made her one of the most admired masters of the American novel.
My Review: Simple, unadorned prose gets very wearing when it's also missing some basic character-building. In 122pp, it's not possible to do a Proustian job of lovingly explaining why people are who they are. But [The Picture of Dorian Gray], also a shortie, has the most gorgeously subtle character-building; [Mrs. Dalloway] is another example; so one concludes that Cather just wasn't interested in Lou or Oscar or the French neighbors.
As a moment in time, the book is invaluable. A concise slice of the life led by the crazy dreamers who decided the Old Country was no longer enough for them and their kids, packed what they could afford to carry, and vamoosed for the New World.
There is a private society that's trying to get together a colony of people with all the talents necessary to keep themselves alive on Mars. It's a one-way ticket...just like the pioneers of old.
How I wish I was young and healthy. I'd be on that rocket in a heartbeat.
March 20, 2015
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 she occupies in Nebraska, states at one point that It's what goes on in the (outside) world that reconciles me. Meanwhile, regarding another character, a rather worldly Carrie Jensen, it is said that her despondence abated just as soon as she left the prairie.
While not a native of Nebraska, Willa Cather embraced the soil and conveyed Midwestern roots but it seemed only by leaving Nebraska for points much farther east could the author fully appreciate her connection to the area of "The Divide" that is at the the core of this & some of her other memorable tales.
Oddly enough, Willa Cather, who for a fair stretch of time saw herself as William Cather & dressed in men's clothes at a time when few women wore trousers & similar garb, seems to cast characters in O Pioneers! who often seem androgynous.
This is especially true of the main character, Alexandra Bergson. For in a way, "Alex" serves as a model or herald for a robust late 19th Century woman & a vision of what a truly independent woman might become, though someone who is indifferent to romance & sexuality, married to the land as if it were her husband rather than being open to suitors, though the very meek but supportive Carl Lindstrom is definitely more than a casual friend. After Carl's return from Alaska where opportunity failed to surface for him, a meaningful partnership with Alexandra seems in the offing.
The author's 1st novel was in the style of Henry James, an author Willa Cather very much admired but fellow writer Sarah Jewitt emphatically encouraged Cather to write about what she knew best and her subsequent & very successful novels did just that. While there is more than a bit of ambiguity about a few of the characters, I hold with a Cather biographer, Sharon O'Brien, who comments
Alexandra seems a more than competent administrator of the property she manages and which had been in the care of her late father, from whom she gained an avid respect for the land. Her ability to take risks, unlike two other brothers who were bequeathed land of their own, seems fueled in equal parts by her own imagination but also by her brother Emil's exposure to new ideas while at university, even though he is less than inclined to spend a lifetime as a farmer.
I don't wish to reveal the plotline in greater detail or the novel's concluding event but this is a book full of well-crafted prose that wraps around the concept of the immigrant experience in rural America and the relationship to the land of people who were not born caring for it but who had to to develop their methods of stewardship one step at a time. Just one example:
Upon returning to Nebraska years later, Cather reckoned that the days of the pioneer were at an end, at least with regard to the Nebraska the author remembered fondly. The various ethnic & religious communities had seemed to lose their distinct qualities, as some folks intermarried, while others moved away & blended in to the fabric of American life elsewhere.
However, in reading about the author's sense of nostalgia for earlier times, I was confronted with the comment from the film Nebraska where one of the characters remarks, "My folks are over there in the Catholic cemetery. Catholics wouldn't be caught dead in this cemetery around all these damned Lutherans!" Some traditions die hard, so to speak...
*1st photo image within my review of a young Willa Cather; 2nd=of the author's childhood home; 3rd= Cather later in life; the last= a landscape in "Willa Cather country", Red Cloud, Nebraska.
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 she occupies in Nebraska, states at one point that It's what goes on in the (outside) world that reconciles me. Meanwhile, regarding another character, a rather worldly Carrie Jensen, it is said that her despondence abated just as soon as she left the prairie.
While not a native of Nebraska, Willa Cather embraced the soil and conveyed Midwestern roots but it seemed only by leaving Nebraska for points much farther east could the author fully appreciate her connection to the area of "The Divide" that is at the the core of this & some of her other memorable tales.
Oddly enough, Willa Cather, who for a fair stretch of time saw herself as William Cather & dressed in men's clothes at a time when few women wore trousers & similar garb, seems to cast characters in O Pioneers! who often seem androgynous.
This is especially true of the main character, Alexandra Bergson. For in a way, "Alex" serves as a model or herald for a robust late 19th Century woman & a vision of what a truly independent woman might become, though someone who is indifferent to romance & sexuality, married to the land as if it were her husband rather than being open to suitors, though the very meek but supportive Carl Lindstrom is definitely more than a casual friend. After Carl's return from Alaska where opportunity failed to surface for him, a meaningful partnership with Alexandra seems in the offing.
The author's 1st novel was in the style of Henry James, an author Willa Cather very much admired but fellow writer Sarah Jewitt emphatically encouraged Cather to write about what she knew best and her subsequent & very successful novels did just that. While there is more than a bit of ambiguity about a few of the characters, I hold with a Cather biographer, Sharon O'Brien, who comments
To argue that most of Cather's male characters engaged in love affairs are not really male but female, as some of her readers have done, is to question the writer's ability to transcend self, gender & sexuality by adopting other selves and to assume that because Willa Cather was lesbian, she was encoding a lesbian attachment whenever writing of heterosexual love, a rigid view of her fiction.O Pioneers! represents a novel rich in detail and full of memorable characters. Among them is Alexandra Bergson's brother Emil, a college man with a fascination for scientific method and seemingly torn between two worlds. Emil serves as a considerable support for Alexandra, encouraging her entrepreneurial spirit & reflecting her view of nature.
Alexandra seems a more than competent administrator of the property she manages and which had been in the care of her late father, from whom she gained an avid respect for the land. Her ability to take risks, unlike two other brothers who were bequeathed land of their own, seems fueled in equal parts by her own imagination but also by her brother Emil's exposure to new ideas while at university, even though he is less than inclined to spend a lifetime as a farmer.
I don't wish to reveal the plotline in greater detail or the novel's concluding event but this is a book full of well-crafted prose that wraps around the concept of the immigrant experience in rural America and the relationship to the land of people who were not born caring for it but who had to to develop their methods of stewardship one step at a time. Just one example:
We hadn't any of us much to do with it, Carl. The land did it. It had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself. It woke up out of its sleep & stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still.
As for me, I began to buy land. For years after that, I was always squeezing & borrowing until I was afraid to show my face at the banks. And then, all at once, men began to come to me offering to lend me money--and I didn't need it!
Then I moved ahead & built this house. And now the old story has begun to write itself over there. 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.
Upon returning to Nebraska years later, Cather reckoned that the days of the pioneer were at an end, at least with regard to the Nebraska the author remembered fondly. The various ethnic & religious communities had seemed to lose their distinct qualities, as some folks intermarried, while others moved away & blended in to the fabric of American life elsewhere.
However, in reading about the author's sense of nostalgia for earlier times, I was confronted with the comment from the film Nebraska where one of the characters remarks, "My folks are over there in the Catholic cemetery. Catholics wouldn't be caught dead in this cemetery around all these damned Lutherans!" Some traditions die hard, so to speak...
*1st photo image within my review of a young Willa Cather; 2nd=of the author's childhood home; 3rd= Cather later in life; the last= a landscape in "Willa Cather country", Red Cloud, Nebraska.
January 11, 2017
Este es otro libro para sentir más que para dejarse llevar por la trama, es muy cortito, sencillo pero TAN evocador. Habla de gente corriente, de trabajadores y de mujeres emprendedoras a más no poder. El final me ha desconcertado un poco pero en general me ha parecido una delicida de lectura (y además me ha enganchado muchísimo, justo lo que necesitaba).
March 7, 2019
[4.5] Cather left me cold when I read her a few decades ago. I'm so glad I re-visited her! I love so much about this book. I'm not a fan of descriptive prose but Cather's words succinctly placed me in the Nebraska farmland. I understood how the power of the land motivated and inspired Alexandra.
O Pioneers is set in the late 19th and early 20th century and Alexandra, who grows to become an independent and intelligent businesswoman, has to fight against the restraints of her time. One of the most stunning scenes in the novel is a conversation about her future with her brothers, who dismiss her because of her sex. I also liked the unusual development of her relationship with Carl. I am looking forward to returning to more Cather!
O Pioneers is set in the late 19th and early 20th century and Alexandra, who grows to become an independent and intelligent businesswoman, has to fight against the restraints of her time. One of the most stunning scenes in the novel is a conversation about her future with her brothers, who dismiss her because of her sex. I also liked the unusual development of her relationship with Carl. I am looking forward to returning to more Cather!
July 5, 2010
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 desirable. but this land was an enigma. It was
like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness,
that runs wild and kicks things to pieces. He had an idea
that no one understood how to farm it properly, and this
he often discussed with Alexandra. Their neighbors,
certainly, knew even less about farming than he did."(p 14)
It would fall to Alexandra to lead her family in taming the land as best she could, trying to keep the promise made to her father. After a trip to look at land in another area, Alexandra rides home with her young brother Emil.
"When the road began to climb the first long swells of
the Divide, Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil
wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so
radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time,
perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic
ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning.
It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her
eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her.
Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which
breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent
to a human will before. The history of every country begins
in the heart of a man or a woman." (p 35)
Alexandra and her brothers work tirelessly, as do their neighbors. This story is an anthem to those farmers who gave everything to the land, some loving it, some despising it. They are the forerunners of the remaining family farms of today.
One last quote just because I like it's picture of the season:
"Winter had settled down over the Divide again; the season
in which Nature recuperates, in which she sinks in sleep
between the fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring.
The birds have gone. The teeming life that goes on down
in the long grass is exterminated. The prairie-dog keeps
to his hole. The rabbits run shivering from one frozen
garden patch to another and are hard put it to find frost-
bitten cabbage stalks. At night the coyotes roam the wintry
waste, howling for food. The variegated fields are all one
color now; the pastures, the stubble, the roads, the sky
are the same leaden gray...One could easily believe that in
that dead landscape the germs of life and fruitfulness
were extinct forever." (p 97)
But formidable people such as Alexandra saw the possibility of spring returning.
Highly recommended
There are different views of the land's influence on its people:
"John Bergson had the Old-World belief that land, in
itself, is desirable. but this land was an enigma. It was
like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness,
that runs wild and kicks things to pieces. He had an idea
that no one understood how to farm it properly, and this
he often discussed with Alexandra. Their neighbors,
certainly, knew even less about farming than he did."(p 14)
It would fall to Alexandra to lead her family in taming the land as best she could, trying to keep the promise made to her father. After a trip to look at land in another area, Alexandra rides home with her young brother Emil.
"When the road began to climb the first long swells of
the Divide, Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil
wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so
radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time,
perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic
ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning.
It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her
eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her.
Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which
breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent
to a human will before. The history of every country begins
in the heart of a man or a woman." (p 35)
Alexandra and her brothers work tirelessly, as do their neighbors. This story is an anthem to those farmers who gave everything to the land, some loving it, some despising it. They are the forerunners of the remaining family farms of today.
One last quote just because I like it's picture of the season:
"Winter had settled down over the Divide again; the season
in which Nature recuperates, in which she sinks in sleep
between the fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring.
The birds have gone. The teeming life that goes on down
in the long grass is exterminated. The prairie-dog keeps
to his hole. The rabbits run shivering from one frozen
garden patch to another and are hard put it to find frost-
bitten cabbage stalks. At night the coyotes roam the wintry
waste, howling for food. The variegated fields are all one
color now; the pastures, the stubble, the roads, the sky
are the same leaden gray...One could easily believe that in
that dead landscape the germs of life and fruitfulness
were extinct forever." (p 97)
But formidable people such as Alexandra saw the possibility of spring returning.
Highly recommended
September 23, 2015
I was enraptured by Cather's smooth prose, the beautifully woven descriptions of the land with its double facet; hostile wilderness and source of livelihood; I warmed to all the characters, who were exquisitely painted in relation to the different degrees of understanding of the land, I fell prey to the nostalgic hues that tinted the story, its cinematic texture; but when I turned the last page of the book, I felt part of the magic disappeared by Alexandra's conservative morals.
The writing is undeniably delightful, the impression of real life happening through the eyes of very well developed characters straddling three generations and the land finally arising as the sole "winner" in the story tugged at my heartstrings in a cannon of voices, but I also felt the need to substract a star as homage for those two white butterflies fluttering under the canopy of the mulberry tree, which still remains impassible to the ailments of men under the gibbon moon.
I will be looking forward to reading The Song of the Lark and confirm whether My Ántonia is my favorite of the Great Plains Trilogy.
The writing is undeniably delightful, the impression of real life happening through the eyes of very well developed characters straddling three generations and the land finally arising as the sole "winner" in the story tugged at my heartstrings in a cannon of voices, but I also felt the need to substract a star as homage for those two white butterflies fluttering under the canopy of the mulberry tree, which still remains impassible to the ailments of men under the gibbon moon.
I will be looking forward to reading The Song of the Lark and confirm whether My Ántonia is my favorite of the Great Plains Trilogy.
April 15, 2020
“She had never known before how much the country meant to her.The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.”
This book is as much about the landscape as it is about Alexandra Bergson, an intelligent selfless woman, whose father has entrusted with his land. Working the tough prairie land is difficult, but Alexandra has a love of the land and the determination to follow it through. Her spirit and love of the land reminded me of Scarlett O’Hara (although not as ruthless) and So Big by Edna Ferber.
Willa Cather is a lovely writer who brought the time and the place to life- 1880’s Nebraska, where many of the farmers were immigrants. The melodic flow of her writing was a joy to read. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and plan to read more by the author.
This book is as much about the landscape as it is about Alexandra Bergson, an intelligent selfless woman, whose father has entrusted with his land. Working the tough prairie land is difficult, but Alexandra has a love of the land and the determination to follow it through. Her spirit and love of the land reminded me of Scarlett O’Hara (although not as ruthless) and So Big by Edna Ferber.
Willa Cather is a lovely writer who brought the time and the place to life- 1880’s Nebraska, where many of the farmers were immigrants. The melodic flow of her writing was a joy to read. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and plan to read more by the author.
December 11, 2021
“But you show for it yourself, Carl. I’d rather have had your freedom than my land.”
Carl shook his head mournfully. “Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.”
Carl shook his head mournfully. “Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.”
August 12, 2013
Where has Willa Cather been all my reading life? Until fairly recently, I'd never heard of her. Now that I've read just one of her novels, I want to read more.
This short novel is centred on Alexandra Bergson, the daughter of Swedish immigrants whose intelligence and hard work brings her success as a farmer in a rural area of early 20th century Nebraska. It's a deceptively simple novel, with a third person narrative progressed in chronological order. However, even though Cather's narrative style is straightforward, economical and without artifice, her descriptions of landscape are deeply poetic and her characters are created with great compassion. Cather made me feel her connection to the time, the place and the people and there is something about her writing which rings true. I'm very happy to have become acquainted with her work.
August 7, 2017
Alexandra Bergson may just be my favorite female protagonist. Holy Moly was I impressed with the strength of this book - considering the time period that it was crafted in.
The Bergson's own a farm in Hanover, Nebraska and while most of the world is moving away from farmland and towards the new technology and quite literally moving closer to the river. Alex puts her foot down and takes control of her family's farm. Despite having 2 older brothers (Lou & Oscar- dimwits!) and 1 younger brother- Emil, she stands up for herself and the future of her land. The novel opened with Emil & Alex playing with a kitten, I knew at once that the descriptions of the prairie lands would hold me captive. Enter a few orchards and sweeping trees and a horse or two and I'm completely "IN" with the setting of this book.
My heart frequently rose and fell over the coarse of this short novel, and the characters held me captive. I grew to love Alex and Marie Shabata (her darling neighbor). The compassion that this novel shows was far ahead of its time. No idea what took me quite so long to pick up a book by Ms. Cather- but I'm so glad I did. Looking forward to more of her work.
The Bergson's own a farm in Hanover, Nebraska and while most of the world is moving away from farmland and towards the new technology and quite literally moving closer to the river. Alex puts her foot down and takes control of her family's farm. Despite having 2 older brothers (Lou & Oscar- dimwits!) and 1 younger brother- Emil, she stands up for herself and the future of her land. The novel opened with Emil & Alex playing with a kitten, I knew at once that the descriptions of the prairie lands would hold me captive. Enter a few orchards and sweeping trees and a horse or two and I'm completely "IN" with the setting of this book.
My heart frequently rose and fell over the coarse of this short novel, and the characters held me captive. I grew to love Alex and Marie Shabata (her darling neighbor). The compassion that this novel shows was far ahead of its time. No idea what took me quite so long to pick up a book by Ms. Cather- but I'm so glad I did. Looking forward to more of her work.
April 15, 2013
I remember putting Death Comes for the Archbishop back on the library shelf when I was kid, thinking it sounded boring. Perhaps that preconception stuck with me, because this is the first Cather I've read. It is far from boring. The prose seems effortless, the pages turn quickly and I became invested in the characters.
Over the weekend, while in Jackson, Mississippi, I came across a quoted conversation (in the Mississippi Writers Exhibit in the public library renamed the Eudora Welty Library) that had Faulkner answering Clark Cable's question about whom he thought were the best living writers:
"Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, and myself."
I found it interesting that Faulkner included Cather (and that I came across this while I was reading her for the first time). Though there are no similarities as far as their styles, the conception of the land as an eternal presence can be found in this novel, as it is in Faulkner's works.
This was an early novel of Cather's and from what I've heard, there are others of hers that are even better. I look forward to reading them.
Over the weekend, while in Jackson, Mississippi, I came across a quoted conversation (in the Mississippi Writers Exhibit in the public library renamed the Eudora Welty Library) that had Faulkner answering Clark Cable's question about whom he thought were the best living writers:
"Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, and myself."
I found it interesting that Faulkner included Cather (and that I came across this while I was reading her for the first time). Though there are no similarities as far as their styles, the conception of the land as an eternal presence can be found in this novel, as it is in Faulkner's works.
This was an early novel of Cather's and from what I've heard, there are others of hers that are even better. I look forward to reading them.
July 26, 2022
Willa Cather (1873-1947) was actually born in Virginia; but she was raised in rural Nebraska from the time she was nine years old, and though she moved back East after college, her consciousness was profoundly steeped in the memories of prairie life and a deep reverence for the land and for the courage of the settlers who built lives and community there in the face of great hardship. This was the first (published in 1913) of three novels with that setting that she would write, which proved to be some of the most enduring of her works. The same setting would also inspire some of her short fiction, including "Neighbor Rosicky," the story which introduced me to her as a high school student. I went on to read another of her prairie novels, My Antonia, that same year (my review of that one is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... , and some of those comments are relevant here as well). But though I always had intentions of reading more of her work, it's sadly taken me this long to get around to doing so. My only regret is that I didn't get back to her much sooner!
Our main setting here is the small farming community of Hancock, modeled on the author's real-life hometown, Red Cloud. (We'll also visit Lincoln, seat of her alma mater, the Univ. of Nebraska.)
The tale begins in 1883, where we meet young Swedish immigrant farm girl Alexandra Bergson (who's apparently in her early 20s); neighbor Carl Linstrum; her younger brothers Oscar and Lou and the much younger baby of the family, Emil, who's five; and her parents, including her dying father, worn out by his struggles with the initially unproductive land and often unhelpful weather. Recognizing in her the smarts and grit he realizes his wife and sons don't have, on his deathbed John Bergson basically invests Alexandra with the headship of the family and the custody of his dream of making something of their homestead. (And she'll have her work cut out for her!) After 1883-4, we skip over an intervening 16 years. When the story resumes in ca. 1900, the land has blossomed. But life has a way of posing other challenges even more demanding than wresting a living from the wilderness....
The novel is well-crafted, with a plot that unfolds naturally in the author's good time, and which doesn't need a spoiler-ish summary. (Unlike some cover blurbs, the one on this 1987 printing by Houghton Mifflin doesn't attempt one; nor does the Goodreads description.) Suffice it to say that we have both joy and tragedy, family relationships healthy and not so healthy, forbidden love and enduring love, an exploration of what matters in life, a look at the immigrant experience, and a celebration of the enduring land and of the qualities of those who partner with it for a lifetime to bring forth something worthwhile. In Alexandra, we have one of the greatest strong heroines of mainstream American fiction. There are messages here, but they're delivered very subtly. Cather's style is as solidly Realist as they come (she was perhaps the greatest regionalist Realist of her generation), but she plays as powerful an emotional symphony in the reader as any leading Romantic writer ever achieved. And the climax of the tale will come in a moral choice that's not explicitly associated with Christian faith, but which involves the concept that's central to it --forgiveness.
IMO, this novel is one of the crown jewels of American literature. I can't recommend it highly enough, to all readers who already appreciate serious fiction or who want to discover what that is. (And it's the kind of novel that demonstrates that you don't need a PhD. in literary theory to be an appreciator of serious fiction; you just need a love of reading for the pleasure of it and basic human sympathy for your fellow humans.)
Note 1: This edition has a Foreword by a Doris Grumbach (whose qualifications aren't given). It has information about the author and the background of the book which is interesting, and even fascinating. But you should read it, as I did, after reading the book itself, because it has spoilers --and I'd advise bailing before you get to p. xiv, since starting there it also contains spoilers for The Song of the Lark.
Our main setting here is the small farming community of Hancock, modeled on the author's real-life hometown, Red Cloud. (We'll also visit Lincoln, seat of her alma mater, the Univ. of Nebraska.)
The tale begins in 1883, where we meet young Swedish immigrant farm girl Alexandra Bergson (who's apparently in her early 20s); neighbor Carl Linstrum; her younger brothers Oscar and Lou and the much younger baby of the family, Emil, who's five; and her parents, including her dying father, worn out by his struggles with the initially unproductive land and often unhelpful weather. Recognizing in her the smarts and grit he realizes his wife and sons don't have, on his deathbed John Bergson basically invests Alexandra with the headship of the family and the custody of his dream of making something of their homestead. (And she'll have her work cut out for her!) After 1883-4, we skip over an intervening 16 years. When the story resumes in ca. 1900, the land has blossomed. But life has a way of posing other challenges even more demanding than wresting a living from the wilderness....
The novel is well-crafted, with a plot that unfolds naturally in the author's good time, and which doesn't need a spoiler-ish summary. (Unlike some cover blurbs, the one on this 1987 printing by Houghton Mifflin doesn't attempt one; nor does the Goodreads description.) Suffice it to say that we have both joy and tragedy, family relationships healthy and not so healthy, forbidden love and enduring love, an exploration of what matters in life, a look at the immigrant experience, and a celebration of the enduring land and of the qualities of those who partner with it for a lifetime to bring forth something worthwhile. In Alexandra, we have one of the greatest strong heroines of mainstream American fiction. There are messages here, but they're delivered very subtly. Cather's style is as solidly Realist as they come (she was perhaps the greatest regionalist Realist of her generation), but she plays as powerful an emotional symphony in the reader as any leading Romantic writer ever achieved. And the climax of the tale will come in a moral choice that's not explicitly associated with Christian faith, but which involves the concept that's central to it --forgiveness.
IMO, this novel is one of the crown jewels of American literature. I can't recommend it highly enough, to all readers who already appreciate serious fiction or who want to discover what that is. (And it's the kind of novel that demonstrates that you don't need a PhD. in literary theory to be an appreciator of serious fiction; you just need a love of reading for the pleasure of it and basic human sympathy for your fellow humans.)
Note 1: This edition has a Foreword by a Doris Grumbach (whose qualifications aren't given). It has information about the author and the background of the book which is interesting, and even fascinating. But you should read it, as I did, after reading the book itself, because it has spoilers --and I'd advise bailing before you get to p. xiv, since starting there it also contains spoilers for The Song of the Lark.
October 22, 2007
I don’t know how, but I got through all of high school and college in America without reading a word of Willa Cather. It all worked out for the best though, since ten years ago I would have probably found her work like, totally boring and about farming and the human condition, or whatever.
I picked up My Antonia a few months ago and loved it to bits - to me, nothing beats stories written in ordinary language about ordinary people. Mix in some bleak, sweeping plains, some overtly lesbian action, and, yes, some awesome stuff about the human condition, and I’m happy.
O Pioneers! was written five years after My Antonia and you can pretty much tell. The story, while similar, is a bit more fantastic and formulaic - Cather studied a lot of Henry James early in her life, and you can tell. Everything is a little simpler and more straightforward in this book — the themes are more concrete, the storyline moves forward steadily, and the ending is clear-cut.
Still, though, there is some beautiful, wonderful stuff happening. The flat, blank unrelenting landscape makes for a great setting in that the characters are very much on their own - affected only by the weather and by each other. There’s not much out in Nebraska during this time period besides sod and humanity, and Cather knows how to write about both.
It’s one of those books where you want to underline things, all the time, like this: “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 save five notes over for thousands of years. The young people, they live so hard. And yet I sometimes envy them.” Or this, on the very next page, about problem with being free: “Freedom so often means one isn’t needed anywhere.”
And throughout so much of the book, I couldn’t help reeling at how ahead of her time Cather seemed: about women, about education, about religion. And, although it can never be confirmed, since she destroyed all of her personal papers before her death, it seems that Cather was one of the first authors to write about gay rights (but do we really need solid proof? Check out her author photo, for goodness sakes!). For example, in O Pioneers! the moral center of the book is an old man named Ivar. Ivar, whose love and understanding of animals makes him integral to the community, is also mostly mad due to a vague temptation of the body that is never named. He always walks barefoot to punish his body for what he is feeling and constantly reads the Bible for comfort - he has sacrificed his freedom to love in order to reach eternal paradise when he dies.
The book, ultimately, is about the constraints of freedom — being constrained in some respects in order to be free in others - and how getting older means choosing which freedoms you can live with best. Too bad I never got the chance to write a five-page high school essay on this.
I picked up My Antonia a few months ago and loved it to bits - to me, nothing beats stories written in ordinary language about ordinary people. Mix in some bleak, sweeping plains, some overtly lesbian action, and, yes, some awesome stuff about the human condition, and I’m happy.
O Pioneers! was written five years after My Antonia and you can pretty much tell. The story, while similar, is a bit more fantastic and formulaic - Cather studied a lot of Henry James early in her life, and you can tell. Everything is a little simpler and more straightforward in this book — the themes are more concrete, the storyline moves forward steadily, and the ending is clear-cut.
Still, though, there is some beautiful, wonderful stuff happening. The flat, blank unrelenting landscape makes for a great setting in that the characters are very much on their own - affected only by the weather and by each other. There’s not much out in Nebraska during this time period besides sod and humanity, and Cather knows how to write about both.
It’s one of those books where you want to underline things, all the time, like this: “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 save five notes over for thousands of years. The young people, they live so hard. And yet I sometimes envy them.” Or this, on the very next page, about problem with being free: “Freedom so often means one isn’t needed anywhere.”
And throughout so much of the book, I couldn’t help reeling at how ahead of her time Cather seemed: about women, about education, about religion. And, although it can never be confirmed, since she destroyed all of her personal papers before her death, it seems that Cather was one of the first authors to write about gay rights (but do we really need solid proof? Check out her author photo, for goodness sakes!). For example, in O Pioneers! the moral center of the book is an old man named Ivar. Ivar, whose love and understanding of animals makes him integral to the community, is also mostly mad due to a vague temptation of the body that is never named. He always walks barefoot to punish his body for what he is feeling and constantly reads the Bible for comfort - he has sacrificed his freedom to love in order to reach eternal paradise when he dies.
The book, ultimately, is about the constraints of freedom — being constrained in some respects in order to be free in others - and how getting older means choosing which freedoms you can live with best. Too bad I never got the chance to write a five-page high school essay on this.
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