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Zusatztext The land belongs to the future... that's the way it seems to me....I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it -- for a little while." O Pioneers! (1913) was Willa Cather's first great novel, and to many it remains her unchallenged masterpiece. No other work of fiction so faithfully conveys both the sharp physical realities and the mythic sweep of the transformation of the American frontier -- and the transformation of the people who settled it. Cather's heroine is Alexandra Bergson, who arrives on the wind-blasted prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, as a girl and grows up to make it a prosperous farm. But this archetypal success story is darkened by loss, and Alexandra's devotion to the land may come at the cost of love itself. At once a sophisticated pastoral and a prototype for later feminist novels, O Pioneers! is a work in which triumph is inextricably enmeshed with tragedy, a story of people who do not claim a land so much as they submit to it and, in the process, become greater than they were. Informationen zum Autor Willa Cather; Introduction by Elaine Showalter Klappentext 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.INTRODUCTION by Elaine Showalter Halfway through O Pioneers! the prosperous Nebraska farm-owner Alexandra Bergson receives a visit from her old friend, the wandering artist Carl Linstrum. When Alexandra expresses envy of Carl’s freedom, he passionately replies that it is overrated: ‘‘Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him . . . We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.’’ But surprisingly, Alexandra disagrees. ‘‘We grow hard and heavy here. We don’t move lightly and easily as you do, and our minds get stiff. If the world were no wider than my cornfields, if there were not something beside this, I wouldn’t feel that it was much worth while to work...’’ Willa Cather has been cherished by many readers as a great regional artist and a devoted believer in America the Beautiful. Throughout her career, however, the conflict between her love for the world of the Nebraska cornfield and her need to escape its imaginative and intellectual limitations resonated in her work. This self-division is one of the qualities that makes her work so complex and memorable. O Pioneers! (1913) is generally acclaimed as Willa Cather’s great pastoral novel, her 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 and original voice as an American writer, and compared the elegiac tone of her story to Antonin Dvorak’s ‘‘New World’’ Symphony (1893), finished after Dvorak had spent several weeks in the Midwest. But ...
