There is no looking for the central theme or subject there are too many! Of course, this broadness can be overwhelming, at least for me, specifically with time constraints. I love this about it it bites off a chunk of humanity and presents it in all of its intertwined complication. It’s also a text that grapples with a number of large ideas in a relatively short space: identity, personhood, sexuality, gender, labor, and religion, to name a few. It’s not that American literature lacks good novels – quite the opposite– but the form often reads long before the turn of the 20 th century, and when considering squeezing Moby Dick into three, 50-minute periods, O Pioneers! distinctly titled parts are a welcome alternative. With that in mind, Cather’s slim, easily segmented novels are a strong compliment to the short stories, poems, essays and speeches that probably make up the majority of the semester’s reading. If you are still on the fence, though, let me give you a few other reasons, particularly in a survey-style classroom, when a rather large span of time/genre/diversity of author often must be covered. I’m assuming that most recognize her skill and the usefulness of her perspective, and maybe even simply want to teach her out of enjoyment. I guess I should come clean and admit that my daughter may share a name with Cather, and I’m an unabashed fan. But this archetypal success story is darkened by loss, and Alexandra's devotion to the land may come at the cost of love itself.Īt once a sophisticated pastoral and a prototype for later feminist novels, O Pioneers! is a work in which triumph is inextricably enmeshed with tragedy, a story of people who do not claim a land so much as they submit to it and, in the process, become greater than they were.This is not meant to be a case for why Cather’s work, and O Pioneers! in particular, should be taught, though it easily could be.

Cather's heroine is Alexandra Bergson, who arrives on the wind-blasted prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, as a girl and grows up to make it a prosperous farm. No other work of fiction so faithfully conveys both the sharp physical realities and the mythic sweep of the transformation of the American frontier-and the transformation of the people who settled it. O Pioneers! (1913) was Willa Cather's first great novel, and to many it remains her unchallenged masterpiece. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it-for a little while.'

We come and go, but the land is always here. I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children.

O pioneers