O Pioneers!

This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Classic includes a glossary and notes to help the modern reader appreciate the richness of Cather's writing. WILLA CATHER TOOK THE TITLE for her novel of immigrant determination from a Walt Whitman poem, which reads in part: All the past we leave behind;/We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,/Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march. Pioneers! O Pioneers! Unlike Whitman's rousing and lyrical poem, Cather takes a sober and honest look at life on the nineteenth-century American prairie, as Alexandra Bergson, the determined leader of a transplanted European family, struggles to understand farming, weather, the "wild land," and the subtleties of love. O Pioneers! captures both the wonder and the worries of its characters, while never shying away from the physical and emotional challenges of carving out a new life in a new territory. Like Cather's other classic, My Antonia, O Pioneers! vividly and memorably portrays immigrant life in frontier America.