O PIONEERS!

O Pioneers! is a 1913 novel by American author Willa Cather, written while she was living in New York. It was her second published novel and was published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1913. The title is a reference to a poem by Walt Whitman entitled "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" from Leaves of Grass (1855). Then novel was adapted for a 1992 film and a 2009 opera. O Pioneers! tells the story of the Bergsons, a family of Swedish-American immigrants in the farm country near the fictional town of Hanover, Nebraska, at the turn of the 20th century. The main character, Alexandra Bergson, inherits the family farmland when her father dies, and she devotes her life to making the farm a viable enterprise at a time when many other immigrant families are giving up and leaving the prairie. The novel is also concerned with two romantic relationships, one between Alexandra and family , Carl Linstrum, and the other between Alexandra's brother Emil and the married Marie Shabata.