Summary
Willa Cather's O PIONEERS!, first published in 1913, tells the story of Alexandra Bergson, the daughter of a Swedish pioneering family, who successfully takes over the management of the family farm upon her father's death. The story encompasses Alexandra's difficult relationships with her brothers, Oscar and Lou, her love for a neighbor, Carl Lindstrom, and the tragic romance between her youngest brother, Emil, and a married woman. The setting is as important as the events of the story, however. Alexandra's near-obsessive love for the huge sky and vast plains of Nebraska is part of what fuels the plot, and Cather's chronicle of the prairie's evolution from a raw and wild landscape to thriving farmland reflects her own love of the land and her admiration for the immigrants who worked it. O PIONEERS! is an early novel, and in later books Cather would become more skilled at dialogue and plotting, but the passionate conviction she brought to this novel secures its position as one of her greatest works.
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Bibliographic Details
Publisher: Bantam Dell Pub Group
Published date: 1999
Edition: 1th edition
Size: 5.75 x 7.75 inches
Weight: 1.1 pounds
Pages: 371
Publisher's Notes
Though its fame as an icon of twentieth-century literature rests primarily on the brilliance of its narrative technique and the impressionistic beauty of its prose, 'To The Lighthouse' is above all the story of a quest, and as such it possesses a brave and magical universality.
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