O Pioneers! (Bantam classics) - Softcover

Cather, Willa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 055321358X ISBN 13: 9780553213584

Publisher: Bantam Dell Publishing Group, Div of Random House, Inc, 1980

Synopsis

"This early novel is now held to be a very critical and pivotal one in the whole development of the novelist, and this new edition provides . . . a fine printing for readers".-Choice. "A definitive edition of Cather's second novel . . . [that] sets a high standard of quality. . . . David Stouck's comprehensive and cogent historical essay . . . captures not only the life of Cather's text but also provides insight into Cather's imagination and artistic process".-Western American Literature. This is the definitive text of O Pioneers! that appeared in the clothbound Willa Cather Scholarly Edition published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1992. Adhering to the standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association, the editors have been faithful in every detail to Cather's intentions as she prepared the manuscript for the first 1913 edition. Printer's errors, spelling of some foreign names, and inconsistencies in dialect and certain stylistic matters, as well as Cather's later corrections, have all been addressed and corrected. Cather's novel of life on the Nebraska frontier was a critical and popular success (over forty printings) and still speaks to readers today. Susan Rosowski and Charles Mignon are professors of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Kathleen Danker is an assistant professor of English at South Dakota State University. David Stouck is a professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

About this title

Review:

Willa Cather's second novel is abundant with interwoven themes. In one respect Cather bears witness to the early 20th-century Pioneers. The farmer taming the wild Northern States of America, battling with the elements and an unforgiving land to create a home, family and livlihood. On another level O Pioneers! is the story of Alexandra Bergson. Due to the death of her father she becomes the head of the household and spends her time between protecting her younger brother and out in the countryside that has become hers. Overshadowed somewhat by the more popular My Antonia this early work of Cather's is a much admired example of early 20th-century American fiction. O Pioneers! is a powerful testimony to love, the land and the pioneering spirit. --Jon Smith

Review:

The land belongs to the future... that's the way it seems to me....I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it -- for a little while."

O Pioneers! (1913) 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam Dell Publishing Group, Div of Random House, Inc
• Publication date: 1980
• ISBN 10: 055321358X
• ISBN 13: 9780553213584
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 224