O Pioneers!

"O Pioneers! is acclaimed as Willa Cather's great pastoral novel, a loving celebration of Nebraska and its immigrant people at the turn of the twentieth century. Cather herself regarded the book as the beginning of her authentic voice as an American writer.... But just as the novel is set on the Nebraska Divide—the broad prairie between two rivers—O Pioneers! reflects the imaginative divide in Cather's work between profound admiration for the heroic American pioneer past and horrified awareness of the cultural emptiness, monotony, and maddening isolation of the pioneer life."

—from the Introduction by Elaine Showalter