O Pioneers!

'Cather allows a glimpse into the depths of emotion that lie beneath this deceptively simple surface' GUARDIAN 'She is undoubtedly one of the greatest American writers' OBSERVER 'This beautiful book . . . May it live forever' NEW YORKER Alexandra Bergson is the eldest child of a Swedish immigrant family newly arrived in the harsh untamed landscape of the American West. An original, determined child, she is driven by two forces: her fierce protective love for her younger brother and a deep love of the beautiful country she has come to regard as her own. When her father dies, it is she who becomes the head of the family and struggles to soften the wild overgrown soil that surrounds her, nurturing it until, finally, it rewards her with a richness beyond measure . . . 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.