Wiseblood Books
  • Home
  • Our Books
    • Fiction
    • Poetry
    • Essays
    • Wiseblood Classics
    • Book Sets
  • Authors
    • Annabelle Moseley
    • Andrew McNabb
    • Amy Krohn
    • Charles Hughes
    • Fr. Colum Power
    • Cynthia L Haven
    • Dana Gioia
    • Dena Hunt
    • Garnett Kilberg Cohen
    • Geoffrey Smagacz
    • Glenn Arbery
    • James Matthew Wilson
    • Kaye Park Hinckley
    • Karen Ullo
    • Kevin Starr
    • Lee Oser
    • Nathaniel L. Hansen
    • Pierre Manent
    • R.R. Reno
    • Robert Vander Lugt
    • Robert Waldron
    • Samuel Hazo
    • Trevor C. Merrill
  • Our Editors
  • Residency
    • About
    • Submission Guidelines & Form
    • Current Writer-in-Residence
  • Donate
  • Weblog
  • Newsletter
  • Submissions

O Pioneers! New Willa Cather Classic!

8/21/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
"And now the old story has begun to write itself over there," said Carl softly. "Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years."     
-Willa Cather, O Pioneers!*





With O PioS!, the first novel of The Great Plains Trilogy, Willa Cather proved her fierce and humble talent. A tale of the Nebraskan prairie land as encountered by Swedish, Czech, French, and Bohemian immigrants, Cather's novel is an epic that traces a family of stubborn American pioneers as they wrestle with, and--in some cases--are defeated by, the plains.
Swedish immigrant Alexandra Bergson inherits her father's farm and must morph it from raw prairie into a prosperous enterprise. Bergson is the first of Cather's great heroines, but the land, or, as Cather calls it, the "wild land," is also an immensely important character. In O Pioneers! descriptions of the land are so evocative, lush, and moving that they provoked writer Rebecca West to say of her: "The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us."

*Our Wiseblood Classic edition of Cather's O Pioneers!
can be purchased here for only $7.00.



0 Comments



Leave a Reply.