"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

The novel that first made Willa Cather famous—a powerfully mythic tale of the American frontier told through the life of one extraordinary woman—in a handsome hardcover volume.

No other work of fiction so vividly evokes the harsh beauty and epic sweep of the Nebraska prairies that Cather knew and loved. The heroine of O Pioneers!, Alexandra Bergson, is a young Swedish immigrant at the turn of the twentieth century who inherits her father’s windblasted land and, through years of hard work, turns it into a prosperous farm. Fiercely independent, Alexandra sacrifices love and companionship in her passionate devotion to the land, until tragedy strikes and brings with it the chance for a new life.

One of our most beloved classics, one of the great heroines of American literature.

Everyman’s Library: 2011 • Hardcover: 216 pages