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  • Published: 1 January 1994
  • ISBN: 9780140187755
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $22.99

O Pioneers!





The first novel in Willa Cather's acclaimed Great Plains Trilogy, published for the first time by Vintage Classics with beautiful jackets.

The first of Cather’s renowned prairie novels, O Pioneers! established a new voice in American literature—turning the stories of ordinary Midwesterners and immigrants into authentic literary characters.

O Pioneers! was Willa Cather's first great novel, and to many it remains her unchallenged masterpiece. 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. 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. But this archetypal success story is darkened by loss, and Alexandra's devotion to the land may come at the cost of love itself.

At once a sophisticated pastoral and a prototype for later feminist novels, O Pioneers! is a work in which triumph is inextricably enmeshed with tragedy, a story of people who do not claim a land so much as they submit to it and, in the process, become greater than they were.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

  • Published: 1 January 1994
  • ISBN: 9780140187755
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Willa Cather

Novels by Willa CatherAlexander's Bridge 1912 O Pioneers! 1913 The Song of the Lark 1915 My Ántonia 1918 One of Ours 1922 A Lost Lady 1923 The Professor's House 1925 My Mortal Enemy 1926 Death Comes for the Archbishop 1927 Shadows on the Rock 1931 Lucy Gayheart 1935 Sapphira and the Slave Girl 1940
Short Fiction

The Troll Garden 1905 Youth and the Bright Medusa 1920 Obscure Destinies 1932 The Old Beauty and Others 1948 Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction, 1892-1912 1965 Uncle Valentine and Other Stories: Willa Cather's Uncollected Short Fiction, 1915-1929 1972

Introducer Biography: Elaine Showalter is the author of the recent ground-breaking study of American women writers, A Jury of Her Peers, and the classic A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing.

Also by Willa Cather

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Praise for O Pioneers!