And she was ruthless in correcting and sometimes reworking whole books years after they were first published. Notably, she forbade the publication of her correspondence and other private papers. She destroyed drafts that displeased her, threw away whole manuscripts, tossed edited proofs, burned letters.
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.Willa Cather was no friend to archivists. 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. that's the way it seems to me.I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. Willa Cather, perhaps more than any other American writer, was able to re-create the real drama of the pioneers, capturing for later generations a time, a place, and a spirit that has become part of our national heritage. But the wild land itself is an equally important character in Cather’s books, and her descriptions of it are so evocative, lush, and moving that they provoked writer Rebecca West to say of her: “The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us.”
A tale of the prairie land encountered by America’s Swedish, Czech, Bohemian, and French immigrants, as well as a story of how the land challenged them, changed them, and, in some cases, defeated them, Cather’s novel is a uniquely American epic.Īlexandra Bergson, a young Swedish immigrant girl who inherits her father’s farm and must transform it from raw prairie into a prosperous enterprise, is the first of Cather’s great heroines-all of them women of strong will and an even stronger desire to overcome adversity and succeed. One of America’s greatest writers, Cather established her talent and her reputation with this extraordinary novel-the first of her books set on the Nebraska frontier. The novel that first made Willa Cather famous-a powerfully mythic tale of the American frontier told through the life of one extraordinary woman
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