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  • Published: 20 August 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241338353
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $29.99

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.

  • Published: 20 August 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241338353
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

Willa Cather

Willa Cather was a Pulitzer prize-winning American writer, best known for her novels of Nebraskan frontier life. Born in 1873 near Winchester, Virginia, she moved with her family to Catherton, Nebraska in 1883, and the landscape went on to have a formative effect on her. Before becoming a full-time writer, Cather worked as a journalist, a magazine editor and a teacher.


Her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, was published in 1912, followed by titles including O Pioneers! (1913); The Song of the Lark (1915); My Ántonia (1918); One of Ours (1922), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize; Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). She died in New York in 1947.

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Praise for O Pioneers!

Her voice, laconical and richly sensuous, sings out with a note of unequivocal love for the people she is setting down on the page

Marina Warner

The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us

Rebecca West

Takes a knife and stabs you through the heart, by its joining of such ravishment with such pessimism

New Yorker