From the publisher
O Pioneers! is the story of Alexandra Bergson, a fiercely independent and clear-headed young woman whose passionate faith in the Nebraska prairie makes her a wealthy landowner. Willa Cather's second novel is imbued with the democratic utopianism of Walt Whitman and the serene regionalism of Sarah Orne Jewett, but it is not merely an elegy for the lost glories of America's pioneer past. In its rage for order and efficiency, O Pioneers! also wrestles with the massive social and economic transformations that made the United States a modern industrial power in the years between the Civil War and the First World War.