O Pioneers!
John Bergson dies on the high Nebraska Divide after eleven years of failure, leaving three sons, a daughter and a mortgaged claim, and he gives the decision to Alexandra because she alone reads the country as something other than an enemy. She holds on through the drought years while the neighbours sell out, borrows to buy the land they abandon, and turns wild sod into wheat; her brothers resent her for it, and on the next farm the young wife Marie Shabata has married a man she cannot live beside. Willa Cather called this the first book in which she used her own material and dedicated it to Sarah Orne Jewett, whose advice sent her back to Nebraska; the title is Whitman's.
Open O Pioneers! in the archive — filters, lineage graph and full facet browsing.
Attributes
Closest analogues
- 58% · 16 shared
- 55% · 14 shared
- 51% · 14 shared
- 51% · 13 shared
- 49% · 12 shared
- 48% · 13 shared